Presence

Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks)

Soul, Heart, and Body One Morning

There's a morning where presence comes over you,
and you sing like a rooster in your earth-colored shape.

Your heart hears and, no longer frantic, begins
to dance. At that moment soul
reaches total emptiness. Your heart becomes Mary,

miraculously pregnant, and body, like a two-day old
Jesus says wisdom words. Now the heart
turns to light, and the body picks up the tempo.

Where Shamsi Tabriz walks, the footprints
are musical notes and holes you fall through into space.

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don't open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

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.