The heart is
The thousand-stringed instrument.
Our sadness and fear come from being
Out of tune with love.
All day long God coaxes my lips
To speak,
So that your tears will not stain
His green dress.
It is not that the Friend is vain,
It is just your life we care about.
Sometimes the Beloved
Takes my pen in hand,
For Hafiz is just a simple man.
The other day the Old One
Wrote on the Tavern wall:
“The heart is
The thousand-stringed instrument
That can only be tuned with
Love.”
now that I have you I’ll never forget what I owe you
I believe in steep drop-offs, the thunderstorm across the lake
in 1949, cold winds, empty swimming pools,
the overgrown path to the creek, raw garlic,
used tires, taverns, saloons, bars, gallons of red wine,
abandoned farmhouses, stunted lilac groves,
gravel roads that end, brush piles, thickets, girls
who haven’t quite gone totally wild, river eddies,
leaky wooden boats, the smell of used engine oil,
turbulent rivers, lakes without cottages lost in the woods,
the primrose growing out of a cow skull, the thousands
of birds I’ve talked to all of my life, the dogs
that talked back, the Chihuahuan ravens that follow
me on long walks. The rattler escaping the cold hose,
the fluttering unknown gods that I nearly see
from the left corner of my blind eye, struggling
to stay alive in a world that grinds them underfoot.
he met the world in darkness and in light
If you have time to chatter
Read books
If you have time to read
Walk into mountains, desert, and ocean
If you have time to walk
Sing songs and dance
If you have time to dance
Sit quietly, you Happy Lucky Idiot
As a boy I studied
literature, but was too lazy to
become a Confucian; in my younger days
I worked at Zen, but got no Dharma worth handing
down. Now I’ve built a grass hut, act as
custodian of a Shinto shrine,
half a shrine, half
a monk.
Friend,
please tell me what
I can do about this world I hold to,
and keep spinning out! I gave up sewn clothes,
and wore a robe, but I noticed one day the cloth was
well woven. So I bought some burlap, but I still throw it
elegantly over my shoulder. I pulled back my sexual longings,
and now I discover that I’m angry a lot. I gave up rage, and
now I notice that I am greedy all day. I worked hard at
dissolving my greed, and now I am proud of myself.
When the mind wants to break its link with
the world it still holds on to one thing.
Kabir says: Listen, my friend,
there are very few that
find the path!