Poems.....

I love the poetry of the Sufi mystic Jalaal'udin Rumi. He has an elegant way with simple imagery -  and some of his poems posess a real earthy directness that can shake you out of your complacency.....

At last you've left and gone
to the Invisible;
How marvellous the way you
 quit this world.

You ruffled your feathers;
and breaking free of your cage,
You took to the air, bound for
you soul's world...

A love-sick nightingale amongst owls,
you caught
The scent of roses, and flew to
the rose garden.

Here are a couple of poems by a favourite Irish poet of mine, Patrick Kavanagh - these two in particular really inspired me when I was growing up to see everything around me as all wondrous manifestations of the same Source....

Is The important thing is not To imagine one ought To have something to say, A raison d'etre, a plot for the play. The only true teaching Subsists in just watching Things moving or just colour Without comment from the scholar. To look on is enough In the business of love. Casually remark, On a deer running in a park; Mention water again, Always virginal, Always original, It washes out Original Sin. Name for the future The everydays of Nature And without being analytic Create a great epic. Girls in red blouses, Steps up to houses, Sunlight round gables, Gossip's young fables, The life of a street. O wealthy me! O happy state! With an inexhaustible theme, I'll die in harness, I'll die in harness with my scheme.

Innocence They laughed at one I loved - The triangular hill that hung Under the Big Forth. They said That I was bounded by the whitethorn hedges Of the little farm and did not know the world. But I knew that love's doorway to life Is the same doorway everywhere. Ashamed of what I loved I flung her from me and called her a ditch Although she was smiling at me with violets. But now I am back in her briary arms; The dew of an Indian Summer morning lies On bleached potato-stalks - What age am I? I do not know what age I am, I am no mortal age; I know nothing of women, Nothing of cities, I cannot die Unless I walk outside these whitethorn hedges.

Here a lovely poem by the great Indian seer-poet Kalidasa, who lived around 400AD:

Look to this day;
For it is life, the very life of life.
In its brief course
Lie all the verities and realities of your existence.
The bliss of growth,
The glory of action,
The splendour of achievement,
Are but experiences of time.
For yesterday is but a dream
And tomorrow is only a vision
And today well-lived
Makes yesterday a dream of happiness
and every tomorrow a vision of hope.

Look well therefore to this day;
Such is the salutation to the ever-new dawn!