" Response to your question "

Why ask about behaviour when you
are soul - essence,
and a way of seeing into presence!

Plus you're with us!

How could you worry?

You may as well free a few words
from your vocabulary.

Why and how and
impossible. Open the mouth - cage
and let those fly away.

We are all born by
accident, but still this wandering
caravan will make camp in perfection.

Forget the nonsense categories of
there and here, race, age, religion,
starting point and destination.
You are soul and you are love,
not a sprite or an angel or a human
being!
You are a
Godman - womanGod -manGod -
Godwoman!
No more questions now
as to what it is we're doing here.


*************************************


I hear nothing in my ear
but your voice.
Heart has plundered mind
of its eloquence.

Love writes a transparent
calligraphy, so on
the empty page my soul
can read and recollect.


******************


In your light I learn how to love.
In your beauty how to make poems,

You dance inside my chest
where no one sees you,

but sometimes I do,
and that sight becomes this art.


*******************************

You've so distracted me,
your absence fans my love.
Don't ask how.

Then you come near.
" Do not..." I say, and
" Do not...", you answer.

Don't ask why
this delights me.


******************

" Five things "

I have five things to say,
five fingers to give into your grace.

First, when I was apart from you,
this world did not exist, nor any other.

Second, whatever I was looking for
was always you.

Third, why did I ever learn to
count to three?

Fourth, my cornfield is burning!

Fifth, this finger stands for Rabia,
and this is for someone else.
Is there a difference?

Are these words or tears?
Is weeping speech?
What shall I do my love?

So the lover speaks and everyone
around begins to cry with him,
laughing crazily, moaning in the
spreading union of lover
and beloved.

This is the true religion. All
others are thrown - away
bandages beside it.

This is the sema of slavery
and mastery dancing together.
This is not- being.

I know these dancers.
Day and night I sing their
songs in this phenomenal
cage.


( Rabia, d. 801, the woman mystic
from Basra who said that the love
for God should not come out of
fear or hope but in response to the
beauty in the heart. She once sat
indoors with her eyes closed on a
lovely spring morning to teach
that external magnificence is only
a reflection of inner kindness and
generosity, and that is divine grace;

Sema, the deep listening of the
ecstatic turning )