[Sunlight] Empty Boat -- Ghazal 622

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Here, Sunlight offers Ghazal 622, from Rumi's Diwan-e Shams,
in a version by Coleman Barks, and in a translation by A.J. Arberry:

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Empty Boat

Some huge work goes on growing. How
could one person's words matter? Where

you walk heads pop from the ground. What
is one seed head compared to yours? On

my death day I'll know the answer. I have
cleared this house, so that your work can,

when it comes, fill every room. I slide
like an empty boat pulled over water.

-- Version by Coleman Barks
"The Soul of Rumi"
HarperCollins, 2001

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Every moment the Soul is decaying and growing before
you, and how should any man plead with you for the sake of a
single soul?
Wherever you set your foot a head springs from the earth;
for one head's sake how should anyone wash his hands of you?
On the day when the soul takes flight in joy at your scent,
the soul knows, the soul knows, what scent wafts from the
Beloved.
Once your crop-sickness diminishes from the brain, the
head raises a hundred laments, every hair is groaning.
I have emptied house, that I may be filled with your furni-
ture; I am waning, that your love may wax and increase.
My soul in the train of Shams al-Haqq-i Tabrizi is scudding
like a ship without feet over the sea.

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

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[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



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[Sunlight] Empty Boat -- Ghazal 622