Granite and Glass

You are granite.

I am an empty wine glass.

You know what happens when we touch.

You laugh like the sun coming up laughs

at a star that disappears into it.

Love opens my chest,

and thought returns to its confines.

Patience and rational considerations leave.

Only passion stays, whimpering and feverish.

Some men fall down in the road like dregs thrown out.

Then totally reckless the next morning

they gallop out with new purposes.

Love is the reality,

and poetry is the drum that calls us to that.

Do not keep complaining about loneliness.

Let the fear-language of that theme

crack open and float away.

Let the priest come down from his tower, and not go back up.

-Rumi

from The Big Red Book

My dear and wonderful grandmother, Nanni, got me the most wonderful present for Christmas, that is perhaps my most cherished gift of all. The Big Red Book by Coleman Barks with poetry by Rumi, an Islamic poet from the 1200s is my new Bible. It is filled with some of the most beautiful words ever written, and such wisdom and purity is contained in the pages that it nearly brought me to tears as I sat reading it on the plane for the first time.

I just finished the first section of the book, and this particular poem stood out to me, especially the second to last stanza. “Do not keep complaining about loneliness/Let the fear-language of that theme/crack open and float away.” This is the reason I write poetry. To me, it is what cracks open my fear, my loneliness, it is truly the drum that calls us to the purity of love. When I pour my words from deep inside the place we call a heart, I cannot complain or fear, I can only open myself to the emotion that runs through me. And this is what Rumi demands of his audience through his poetry: to open. If I can aspire to a grain of the greatness that is carried through his poetry, I will be satisfied.