Every mote

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Today, Sunlight offers Ghazal (Ode) 1195, from Molana
Rumi's "Diwan-e Shams" ("The Collection of Shams"), in a version by
Coleman Barks, and in the translation by A.J. Arberry, from which
Barks developed his version:

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"Music Master"

You that love lovers,
this is your home. Welcome!

In the midst of making form, love
made this form that melts form,
with love for the door,
soul the vestibule.

Watch the dust grains moving
in the light near the window.
Their dance is our dance.

We rarely hear the inward music,
but we're all dancing to it nevertheless,

directed by the one who teaches us,
the pure joy of the sun,
our music master.

-- Version by Coleman Barks
"The Essential Rumi"
HarperSanFrancisco, 1995

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The love of that cherisher of lovers has come to his own
house; Love has in form-conceiving a form melting all forms.
You have come to your own house; welcome, enter! Your coming is
with joy; enter by the door of the heart, run to the vestibule of the
soul!
Every mote of my being is in love with your sun; take heed, for
motes have long transaction with the sun.
See how before the window the motes gracefully suspended
beat; whoever has the sun for a qibla prays after this fashion.
In the concert of the sun these motes are like Sufis; no on
knows to what recitation, to what rhythm, to what harmony.
In every heart there is a different note and rhythm, all stamp-
ing feet outwardly, and the minstrels hidden like a secret.
Loftier than all is our inward concert, our particles dancing
therein with a hundred kinds of glory and pride.
Shams-I Tabrizi, you are the sultan of the sultans of the soul;
no Mahmud like you ever came into being, nor like me any Ayaz.

*The love of Sultan Mahmud and Ayaz became proverbial; see Math.
V:2858 foll.

-- Translation by A.J. Arberry
"Mystical Poems of Rumi 1"
The University of Chicago Press 1968/1991

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Every mote