Conrad Aiken

Separate we come, and separate we go,

And this be it known, is all that we know.

Naomi Shihab Nye

Different Ways to Pray

There was the method of kneeling, a fine method,

if you lived in a country where stones were smooth.

The women dreamed wistfully of bleached courtyards,

hidden corners where knee fit rock.

Their prayers were weathered rib bones,

small calcium words uttered in sequence,

as if this shedding of syllables

could somehow fuse them to the sky.
There were the men who had been shepherds

so long they walked like sheep.

Under the olive trees, they raised their arms—

Hear us! We have pain on earth!

We have so much pain there is no place to store it!

But the olives bobbed peacefully

in fragrant buckets of vinegar and thyme.

At night the men ate heartily, flat bread and white cheese,

and were happy in spite of the pain,

because there was also happiness.
Some prized the pilgrimage,

wrapping themselves in new white linen to ride buses

across miles of vacant sand.

When they arrived at Mecca they would circle the holy places,

on foot, many times, they would bend to kiss the earth and return,

their lean faces housing mystery.
While for certain cousins and grandmothers

the pilgrimage occurred daily,

lugging water from the spring or balancing the baskets of grapes.

These were the ones present at births,

humming quietly to perspiring mothers.

The ones stitching intricate needlework into children’s dresses,

forgetting how easily children soil clothes.
There were those who didn’t care about praying.

The young ones. The ones who had been to America.

They told the old ones, you are wasting your time.

Time?—The old ones prayed for the young ones.

They prayed for Allah to mend their brains, for the twig,

the round moon, to speak suddenly in a commanding tone.
And occasionally there would be one who did none of this,

the old man Fowzi, for example, Fowzi the fool,

who beat everyone at dominoes,

insisted he spoke with God as he spoke with goats,

and was famous for his laugh.

William Shakespeare

Open thy gate of mercy, gracious God,

My soul flies through these wounds to seek out

Thee!

Robert Pollok

Mercy stood in the cloud, with eye that wept

Essential love.

~Course of Time

Kurt Vonnegut

"There are plenty of good reasons for fighting," I said,

"but no good reason ever to hate without reservation,

to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too. "

Where's evil?

"It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit,

that wants to hate with God on its side."

Maya Angelou

Seek patience and passion

in equal amounts.

Patience alone

will not build the temple.

Passion alone

will destroy its walls.

Nasrudin was sitting among the branches of a tree,

sniffing the blossoms and sunning himself.

A traveller with a sincere intention asked him what he was doing there.

'Climbing the Great Pyramid.'

'You are nowhere near a pyramid.

And there are four ways up a pyramid:

one by each face.

That is a tree!'
'Yes!' said the Mulla.

'But it's much more fun like this, don't you think?

Birds, blossoms, zephyrs, sunshine.

I hardly think I could have done better.'

Peter Gizzi

Château if

If love
if then if now
if the flowers of
if the conditional
if of arrows the condition of if
if to say light to inhabit light
if to speak if to live, so
if to say it is you
if love is if your form is
if your waist that pictures the fluted stem
if lavender if in this field
if I were to say hummingbird
if might behave as an adjective here
if not if the heart's a flutter
if nerves map a city
if a city on fire
if I say myself am I saying myself
(if in this instant) as if the object of your gaze
if in a sentence about love you might write
if one day if you would, so
if to say myself
if in this instance
if to speak as another-
if only to render
if in time and accept
if to live now as
if disembodied from the actual handwritten letters m-y-s-e-l-f
if a creature
if what you say
if only to embroider-
a city that overtakes the city I write
if in Provence.

Emily Dickinson

It's all I have to bring to-day,

This, and my heart beside,

This, and my heart, and all the fields,

And all the meadows wide.

Be sure you count, should I forget,--

Some one the sum could tell,--

This, and my heart, and all the bees

Which in the clover dwell!

Idries Shah

A man without a sense of smell went to sleep on a bed of onions,wearing a magnificent robe. When he got up, people fled from him in all directions.

“How lonely is the lot of the aesthete!” he lamented.

“Lacking sensitivity of sight, these people are depriving themselves of something superb.”

~as collected by Idries Shah

Gennady Aygi

éto(byt' mózhet)

véterklónit -

takóye

lyógkoye(dlya smérti)

sérdtse

this(maybe)

is the wind

bending -

so light(for death)

a heart

"When someone brought information to Nushirvan the Just

that an enemy of his had been removed

from this world by Allah the Most High,

he asked:

"Have you heard anything about His intending to spare me?"

Peter Gizzi

To describe a logic of sight

pull the surface onto target and

arrive at zero aperture. Then

fluctuate to a face, reproduced

in serial format, superimposed

upon marginal pedestrians,

traversing a polarity of earth.
The axis here is askew, perhaps

unsettling, the way physical equilibrium

slides into multiple perspective.

This place where

sight informs the eye as gate

to phenomenon, a bridge to

impulse the imaginary.

Simply
she was feeding bread to pigeons

in the park. So begin this lesson with rain

and square the surrounding

flat with common traffic.

I move through, to get here.

If you want me, you will find me

in the garden of vestiges, next to
the sweet water cistern.

Where the old port remains,

a watermark on granite,

abutted withgrass and a stone path

leadingto other places that for the moment

I am not interested in, as I take

serious your claim to provoke you.
And I will follow your instructions,

however silly, however sublime,

until you have found me, indistinguishable

from what you call, your self.

The way I wear you about my mouth,

as a crease, deepening

every time I smile to look at you.
Look at me. I'm serious,

I must find the way, to say, we have arrived.

For it is you who instructs me

in the laws of perspective, these many

converging, lines, drawn to perception.

So that I have become only a star or

an asterisk or a compass rose.

Signifying location, this possibility of place.

True.

It's been said that the burial of the dead

is the beginning of culture, as we know,no other.

And I remain raw.

Vapor digit tapping at my wrist,

the talon, the dorsal fin and the panther claw.

The value of negative space
and the rationale of talisman does not parse,

will not parry from this dearth.

As emotions surround the edge of the planet

adjusted to actual people we meet.

What could the difference of this construction

intend in a world of moments,

merely fragments provided to express conversation
or random noise signaling gray space,

to be inserted within an imported structure?

Birds migrate over cityscape and arrive

in my backyard to a mutiny of peaceful dawn.

Then a description of equality is scored,

as a rhetorical flourish is installed

for testimony.

I flag, I stammer.
A banner to the burden that all things

that are, must not be, in me.

Only,will you not smile,

when I wave?

Amjad Nasser

... But why do this glass and that smoke

not relieve sleeplessness?

Why do I not drift away nor awaken?

It is as though I had not seen

and had not heard

and had not touched

and had not inhaled

what your breath

left upon my hands.

Idries Shah

One day, a seeker, after a lengthy and difficult search, finds Nasrudin sitting in a hut on the side of a mountain. Knowing that every action of the illuminated Sufi is important, the seeker asks why Nasrudin is blowing on his hands. "They're cold, so I'm warming them," Nasrudin says.

A little while later, Nasrudin produces two bowls of soup, and begins to blow on his own. Again, the seeker asks why, and this time Nasrudin says he's cooling it. With that, the seeker leaves, "unable to trust any longer a man who uses the same process to arrive at opposite results!"

from Idries Shah's "A Perfumed Scorpion":

Richard Purdy Wilbur

A World Without Objects is a Sensible Emptiness

The tall camels of the spirit

Steer for their deserts, passing the last groves loud

With the sawmill shrill of the locust,

to the whole honey of the arid

Sun.

They are slow, proud,
And move with a stilted stride

To the land of sheer horizon, hunting Traherne's

Sensible emptiness, there where the brain's lantern-slide

Revels in vast returns.
O connoisseurs of thirst,

Beasts of my soul who long to learn to drink

Of pure mirage, those prosperous islands are accurst

That shimmer on the brink
Of absence; auras, lustres,

And all shinings need to be shaped and borne.

Think of those painted saints,

capped by the early masters

With bright, jauntily-worn
Aureate plates, or evenMerry-go-round rings.

Turn, O turn

From the fine sleights of the sand, from the long empty oven

Where flames in flamings burn
Back to the trees arrayed

In bursts of glare, to the halo-dialing run

Of the country creeks, and the hills' bracken tiaras made

Gold in the sunken sun,
Wisely watch for the sight

Of the supernova burgeoning over the barn,

Lampshine blurred in the steam of beasts,

the spirit's right

Oasis,

light incarnate.

E. E. Cummings

unlove's the heavenless hell and the homeless home

of knowledgeable shadows (quick to seize

each nothing which all soul-less wraiths proclaim

substance; all heartless spectress, happiness)
lovers alone wear sunlight. the whole truth

not hid by matter; not by mind revealed

(more than all dying life, all living death)

and never which has been or will be told
sings only-and all lovers are the song.

here (only here) is freedom: always here

no then of winter equals now of spring;

but april's day transcends november's year
(eternity being so sans until

(twice, have I lived forever in a smile)

Hasan al-Basri (RA)-"Ghuraba"

"The believer in this world is like a stranger: he does not become upset when it puts him down, and he does not compete for it to make him honorable. The people are in a certain state, and he is in another state: the people are relieved of him, and he is exhausted of himself."