Monday, September 28, 2009

All The Hemispheres, by Hafiz


Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake based on Tchaikovsky

Leave the familiar for a while.
Let your senses and bodies stretch out

Like a welcomed season
Onto the meadows and shores and hills.

Open up to the Roof.
Make a new water-mark on your excitement
And love.

Like a blooming night flower,
Bestow your vital fragrance of happiness
And giving
Upon our intimate assembly.

Change rooms in your mind for a day.

All the hemispheres in existence
Lie beside an equator
In your heart.

Greet Yourself
In your thousand other forms
As you mount the hidden tide and travel
Back home.

All the hemispheres in heaven
Are sitting around a fire
Chatting

While stitching themselves together
Into the Great Circle inside of
You.


from The Subject Tonight is Love - versions of Hafiz by Daniel Ladinsky

9 comments:

Prospero said...

Leave the familiar for a while -
seems to be my mantra.

How are you doing, manuela?

Elaine Jarvis said...

What a lovely poem for where you are on your own journey. You're in my thoughts.

Elaine

manuela said...

a worthy and brave mantra, i think, prospero

i am doing well, thank you - finding the cold, usually quite difficult around this time, much easier to deal with a week before heading to a tropical country...

and you, how are you?

manuela said...

so it is, elaine, i'm sure it's why it spoke to me so strongly - though it's the last 6 lines that have stayed with me most -

All the hemispheres in heaven
Are sitting around a fire
Chatting

While stitching themselves together
Into the Great Circle inside of
You.

Roxana said...

and so i imagine us all sitting around a fire, chatting... into the Great Circle of M's worlds :-)

wonderful!

manuela said...

thank you, roxana, i've been enjoying that image since you wrote it - so comfy, and warm, and who does not love to sit around a wood fire???

Roxana said...

:-)

(imi place zambetul tau, asa cum e el distorsionat de prelucrare, si tot se simte caldura :-)

Roxana said...

look what i found this morning, i thought you might want to see as well, though perhaps you will find it a bit disturbing - but since you always ponder about words...


http://theswisslounge.blogspot.com/2009/09/muriel-rukeyser.html

buna dimineata, draga mea!

Manuela said...

I am so afraid of people's words
They describe so distinctly everything:
And this they call dog and that they call house,
here the start and here the end.

I worry about their mockery with words,
they know everything, what will be, what was;
no mountain is still miraculous,
and their house and yard lead right up to God.

I want to warn and object: Let the things be!
I enjoy listening to the sound they are making.
But you always touch: and they hush and stand still.
That's how you kill.

RM Rilke
from In Celebration of Me