Your story Lindorff
I am trying to decipher a story.
(But maybe there is no story)
No, I'm telling you,
Once upon a time there was a story.
In the story there was a beginning and an end
(And a story-teller?)
Yes, of course, and a fire beside which the story was told.
This happened long ago
Long long ago
So get comfortable.
(But what if I fall asleep?)
Then none of this
Will ever have happened.
Don't go back to sleep Rumi
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don't go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don't go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth
across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don't go back to sleep.
Window Czeslaw Milosz
I looked out the window at dawn and saw a young apple tree translucent in brightness.
And when I looked out at dawn once again, an apple tree laden with fruit stood there
Many years had probably gone by but I remember nothing of what happened in my sleep.
......................
There was a serendipity here in my decision to post these three poems. For one thing, Rumi and Milosz are important voices for me. When I first crossed paths with Milosz I was unaware of Rumi. It was 1981. I was a young poet and had just published my first book "The Blue Man: Poems for the late Nuclear Age". He had just been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. I was lucky enough to have literally crossed paths with him in a bookstore in Ann Arbor, and we had a conversation that is emblazoned in my head. As for Rumi, my wife introduced me to him (The Essential Rumi), in about 2003. I was so impressed by him that I read no other poet but Rumi for a year. I needed to figure out what he was doing that was different from any other poet I had read. So here is the sequence of how these poems found each other. First I wrote my poem "Your story", which is a conversation between the poet and himself about the poet stepping up to salvage the story of the passive self who needs to be kept awake, to wake up to the story of his own life Then I opened my Milosz The Collected Poems, where I left my bookmark and I realized the Milosz's poem "Window" was in the same vein as what I had just written. His is about two dawns and two visions of the same fruit tree, one in blossom, one full of fruit and realizing that he had missed everything that happened in between those two dawns - that he had essentially slept through his life. Rumi's poem, quite well known and often quoted, provides a link between mine and Milosz's. Mine is a gentle warning and Milosz's is what happens if the warning goes unheeded.
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