I Traveled
I traveled to every city
There was none like the city of Love.
The city of Love?
I didn’t know what it was.
I didn’t know what I was missing.
Young and callow,
I ran from one city to another.
All I knew was a searing loneliness
I didn’t give Love a thought.
I walked straight out of its honeyed fields,
and like a beast,
grazed on whatever grass I could find.
I hungered for onions and leeks,
not quail, not honey, not manna.
How could I long for what I hadn’t tasted?
Among souls, I was a song alone,
a restless heart with no wings.
A flower has no tongue yet it tastes the rain.
A flower has no throat yet it drinks the rain.
So I tasted and drank the wine of kindness and laughter.
Without my knowing, without my doing,
it seeped into me.
Love called out to my soul,
come in, come close, I’ve built a house for you.
It won’t be free of sorrow or trial.
Come anyway.
No, I said. I won’t enter!
I resisted time and again.
I ripped off my clothes,
wailing in defiance.
Come or go, Love told me,
I am here, closer to you than the vein in your neck.
Then came the enchantment, toying, sweet words—
the magic of the bounding world.
Who am I not to be lured?
And who am I when Love obliterates the I
I thought I was,
drawing me from one path, leading me on another?
I could tell you,
but every time I get to this point,
the tip of my pen breaks.
– Jalaluddin Rumi –
Ghazal 1509, from Rumi’s Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi,
translated from the Persian by Haleh Liza Gafori.
From Water, Rumi translations by Haleh Liza Gafori.
