Poetry for Transformation: Rumi

When I'm with you

we stay up all night

When you're not here

I can't get to sleep

Thank god for these two insomnias

and the difference between them.

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.

Don't go back to sleep.

You must ask for what you really want.

Don't go back to sleep.

People are going back and forth across the door sill

Where the two worlds touch.

The door is round and open.

Don't go back to sleep.

Trust your wound to a teacher's surgery.

Flies collect on a wound. They cover it,

those flies of your self-protecting feelings,

your love for what you think is yours.

Let a teacher wave away the flies

and put a plaster on the wound.

Don't turn your head. Keep looking

at the bandaged wound. That's where

the light enters you.

And don't believe for a moment

that you're healing yourself.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.

Ideas, language. Even the phrase "each other"
doesn't make any sense.

Seawater begs the pearl to break its shell.

And the lily, how passionately it needs some wild darling!

At night, I open the window and ask the moon to come and press its face against mine.

Breathe into me.

Close the language-door and open the love window.

The moon won't use the door, only the window.

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