By Rumi
Translated by Coleman Barks
I am part of the load
Not rightly balanced.
I drop off in the grass,
like the old cave-sleepers, to browse
wherever I fall.
For hundreds of thousands of years I have been dust grains
floating and flying in the will of the air,
often forgetting ever being
in that state, but in sleep
I migrate back. I spring loose
from the four-branched, time-and-space cross,
this waiting room.
I walk into a huge pasture
I nurse the milk of millennia
Everyone does this in different ways.
Knowing that conscious decisions
and personal memory
are much too small a place to live,
every human being streams at night
into the loving nowhere, or during the day,
in some absorbing work.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
From The Essential Rumi, New Expanded Edition, p. 273.
