Stop Being So Religious

What
Do Sad people have in
Common?
It seems
They have all built a shrine
To the past
And often go there
And do a strange wail and
Worship.
What is the beginning of
Happiness?
It is to stop being
so religious
Like
That.

-Hafiz, "Stop Being So Religious"

I'ma get all poetic on you now

Just checked out "The Essential Rumi" at the library. Here's a little taste:

Where Everything is Music

Don't worry about saving these songs!
And if one of our instruments breaks,
it doesn't matter.

We have fallen into the place
where everything is music.

The strumming and the flute notes
rise into the atmosphere,
and even if the whole world's harp
should burn up, there will still be
hidden instruments playing.

So the candle flickers and goes out.
We have a piece of flint, and a spark.

This singing art is sea foam.
The graceful movements come from a pearl
somewhere on the ocean floor.

Poems reach up like spindrift and the edge
of driftwood along the beach, wanting!

They derive
from a slow and powerful root
that we can't see.

Stop the words now.
Open the window in the center of your chest,
and let the spirits fly in and out.

-Rumi

A taste of someone else

Varenna
by Linda Gregerson

Smothered up in gauze, the sky's
            been healing for a week or

two, conserving its basin of gruel.
            The shops have closed

in sympathy. The ferry's ministrations
            barely mark the hour. And just

when we'd convinced ourselves that
            beauty unsubdued betrays

a coarsened mind, the fabric starts
            to loosen, lift, and daylight,

all unblighted, takes a gaudy good-
            night bow. What sodden

indistinction just an hour ago had all
            but persuaded us not to

regret resumes its first divisions;
            slate from cinder, ash

from smoke, warm dapple-gray from
            moleskin, dove- from

Quaker-gray from taupe, until
            the blackwater satins unroll their

gorgeous lengths above a sharpening
            partition of lake-and-loam.

Give up yet? says the cirro-strato-sable
            brush. Then watch

what I can do with orange. And,
            floodlit, ink-besotted, so

assails the upper atmosphere that
            all our better judgment

fails. The Alps? They've seen it all
            before. They've flattened

into waiting mode. The people?
            Flat bedazzled. But,

in fairness, had a shorter way to fall.