Come, seek, for search is the
foundation of fortune: every
success depends upon
focusing the heart.
Your task is not to seek for love,
but merely to seek
and find all the barriers within
yourself that you have built
against it.
The heart has its own
language. The heart knows a
hundred thousand ways to speak.
No conversation about love poems could be complete without discussing Rumi.
If he was alive today Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī would have lived in Afghanistan. A 13th-century Sunni Muslim and Islamic poet, Rumi was so devout in his faith that he wrote in Quatrain, No. 1173: “I am the servant of the Qur’an as long as I have life. I am the dust on the path of Muhammad, the Chosen one. If anyone quotes anything except this from my sayings, I am quit of him and outraged by these words.”
Like the Christian poet of the 16th century, John Donne, Rumi’s love poetry is sometimes indistinguishable from his religious meditations. This might explain why Rumi has some of the simplest yet most profound words of love that I have ever read.
The Ache and Confusion
Near the end you saw rose and thorn together,
Evening and morning light co-mingling.
You have broken many shapes and stirred
their colors in the mud.
Now you sit in the garden not doing a thing,
Smiling. You have felt the ache
and confusion of a hangover, yet
you take again the wine that’s handed you.
The amazing things about Rumi is how accessible the language is, especially considering Rumi lived from 1207 to 1273. I’m sure quite a bit of the simplicity is the result of the talents of the translators who have bring the poetry of Rumi to the English language from his native Persian, but I also think Rumi chose to write simply so that every could understand the words and instead dwell on meaning of his often short and always profound poems.
Let the lover be disgraceful, crazy,
absent-minded. Someone sober
will worry about events going badly.
Let the lover be.
Graceful Indecency 