A Few Things Rumi Might Have Said

Your task is not to seek love,

but to find all the barriers

you’ve built against it.

_

Stop acting so small.

You are the ecstatic motion of the universe.

_

Dance, when you’re broken open.

Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off.

Dance in the middle of the fighting.

Dance in your blood.

Dance when you’re perfectly free.

_

You were born with wings,

why crawl through life?

_

When you do things from your soul,

you feel a river of joy moving in you.

_

When I am with you, we stay up all night.

When you’re not here, I can’t go to sleep.

Praise God for those two insomnias!

And the difference between them.

—

Copyright 2016 Michael Simms. These epigrams have been adapted from various translations of the poetry of Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, the 13th-century Persian poet and Islamic scholar.