Hafiz, The Gift. Daniel Ladinsky, trans. New York: Penguin Compass, 1999.
Tired of Speaking Sweetly
Love wants to reach out and manhandle us,
Break all our teacup talk of God.
If you had the courage and
Could give the Beloved His choice, some nights,
He would just drag you around the room
By your hair,
Ripping from your grip all those toys in the world
That bring you no joy.
Love sometimes gets tired of speaking sweetly
And wants to rip to shreds
All your erroneous notions of truth
That make you fight within yourself, dear one,
And with others,
Causing the world to weep
On too many fine days.
God wants to manhandle us,
Lock us inside of a tiny room with Himself
And practice His dropkick.
The Beloved sometimes wants
To do us a great favor:
Hold us upside down
And shake all the nonsense out.
But when we hear
He is in such a “playful drunken mood”
Most everyone I know
Quickly packs their bags and hightails it
Out of town.
2 comments:
What if all our ideas about God are wrong? What if the images we are holding in our head of God are limiting God’s movement in the world and in our lives? Sometimes God rips these images out of our clenched hands, as if God were saying, no not that, no not that either, no you still haven't got it. The playful, drunken God leads us deep into a place of not knowing and letting go of our controlling ideas about how to live.
I think what I love best about this poem is the image of God practicing His dropkick. Makes me laugh. Makes me giggle. Although God knows I've been on the receiving end of that dropkick and wasn't laughing then, no. My giggle makes me think that perhaps I'm being invited to just hold more loosely to all of the trauma/drama of life.
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