Our Caravan Bell

Do you hear what the violin says

about longing? The same as the stick.

I was once a green branch in the wind.

We are all far from home.

Language is our caravan bell.

Do not stop anywhere.

The moment you are attracted to a place,

you grow bored with it.

Think of the big moves you have already made,

from a single cell to a human being.

Stay light-footed and keep moving.

Turkish, Arabic, Greek, any tongue

is a wind that was formerly water.

As a breeze carries the ocean inside it,

so within every sentence is,

Return to the source.

A moth does not avoid flame.

The king lives in the city.

Out of Stillness

I was happy enough to stay still

inside the pearl inside the shell,

but the hurricane of experience

lashed me out of hiding

and made me a wave moving into shore,

saying loudly the ocean's secret

as I went, and then, spent there,

I slept like fog against the cliff,

another stillness.

A Way of Passing Away

There is a way of passing away

from the personal, a dying

that makes one plural, no longer single.

A gnat lights in the buttermilk

to become nourishment for many.

Your soul is like that, Husam. 

Hundreds of thousands of impressions

from the invisible world are eagerly wanting

to come through you. I get dizzy with the abundance.

When life is this dear, it means the source

is pulling us. Freshness comes from there.

We are given the gift of continuously dying 

and being resurrected, ocean within ocean.

Lion of the Heart

You that come to birth and bring the mysteries,

your voice-thunder makes us very happy.

Float, lion of the heart,

and tear me open.

The Sacred Liquid

 Pierre Puvis de Chavanne, Young Girls by the Seaside

(Jeunes filles au bord de la mer)

Are you jealous of the ocean's generosity?

Why would you refuse to give

this gift to anyone?

Fish don't hold the sacred liquid in cups.

They swim the huge fluid freedom.

The Great Untying

We search this world for the great untying

of what was wed to us at birth

and gets undone at dying.

We sleep beside a stream, thirsty.

Cursed and unlucky his whole life,

an old man finishes up in a niche

of a ruin, inches from the treasure.

Value

Which is worth more, a crowd of thousands,

or your own genuine solitude?

Freedom, or power over an entire nation?

A little while alone in your room

will prove more valuable than anything else

that could ever be given you.