Poetic Spirit

Allegro

By Tomas Transtromer

After a black day, I play Haydn,
and feel a little warmth in my hands.

The keys are ready. Kind hammers fall.
The sound is spiritual, green, and full of silence.

The sound says that freedom exists
and someone pays no taxes to Caesar.

I shove my hands in my haydnpockets
and act like a man who is calm about it all.

I raise my haydnflag. The signal is:
“We do not surrender. But want peace.”

The music is a home of glass standing on a slope;
rocks are flying, rocks are rolling.

The rocks roll straight through the house
but every pane of glass is still whole.

— Tomas Transtromer, “Allegro,” in The Winged Energy of Delight: Selected Translations, Robert Bly, p. 5.

Why Mira Can’t Come Back to Her Old House

By Mirabai

The colors of the Dark One have penetrated Mira’s body; all other colors washed out.
Making love with the Dark One and eating little, those are my pearl and my carnelians.
Meditation beads and the forehead streak, those are my scarves and my rings.
That’s enough feminine wiles for me. My teachers taught me this.
Approve me or disapprove me: I praise the Mountain Energy night and day.
I take the path that ecstatic human beings have taken for centuries.
I don’t steal money, I don’t hit anyone. What will you charge me with?
I have felt the swaying of the elephant’s shoulders; and now you want me to climb on a jackass? Try to be serious.

— Mirabai, in Ibid., p. 36.

Think While You are Alive

By Kabir

Friend, hope for the Guest while you are alive.
Jump into experience while you are alive!
Think . . . and think . . . while you are alive.
What you call “salvation” belongs to the time before death.
If you don’t break your ropes while you are alive,
Do you think
Ghosts will do it after?
The idea that the soul will join with the ecstatic
just because the body is rotten —
that is all fantasy.
What is found now is found then.
If you find nothing now,
you will simply end up with an apartment in the City of Death.
If you make love with the divine now, in the next life you will have the face of satisfied desire.
So plunge into the truth, find out who the Teacher is, believe in the Great Sound!
Kabir says this: When the Guest is being searched for, it is the intensity of the longing for the Guest that does all the work.
Look at me, and you will see a slave of that intensity.

— Kabir, in Ibid., p. 48.

My Spiritual State

By Ghalib

When I look out, I see no hope for change.
I don’t see how anything in my life can end well.

Their funeral date is already decided, but still
People complain that they can’t sleep.

When I was young, my love disasters made me burst out laughing.
Now even funny things seem sober to me.

I know the answer — that’s what keeps me quiet.
Beyond that it’s clear I know how to speak.

Why shouldn’t I scream? I can’t stop. Perhaps
The Great One notices Ghalib only when he stops screaming.

This is the spiritual state I am in:
About myself, there isn’t any news.

I do die; the longing for death is so strong it’s killing me.
Such a death comes, but the other death doesn’t come.

What face will you wear when you visit the Kaaba?
Ghalib, you are shameless even to think of that.

— Ghalib, in Ibid., p. 373.