What We Expect from Ourselves
Here's another small poem from Heaven of Small Moments, this time an ecstatic love poem, newly revised.
What should we expect from ourselves? The mundane, the ordinary, or a wildness and intensity that heightens everything we see and feel? The ecstatic poet Mirabai writes in one of her poems about Krishna: "His seven notes play over and over,/and not even he can stop them." And Rumi writes in Coleman Barks' translation, "What was said to the rose that made it open was said to me here in my chest."
BLACK CARNATIONS
There's someone inside us
who doesn't believe in real time,
and doesn't want it. He knows
a love that is dark
and wild, and his hand
reaches instinctively for it.
A thirsty man claims water;
the cricket, feeling the cold
that is coming,
sings of the frost.
And Rumi saw
through the eyes of his friend
even after his friend was gone.
Why should we expect
anything less from ourselves?
(Copyright Allan Cooper 1998, 2008)
What should we expect from ourselves? The mundane, the ordinary, or a wildness and intensity that heightens everything we see and feel? The ecstatic poet Mirabai writes in one of her poems about Krishna: "His seven notes play over and over,/and not even he can stop them." And Rumi writes in Coleman Barks' translation, "What was said to the rose that made it open was said to me here in my chest."
BLACK CARNATIONS
There's someone inside us
who doesn't believe in real time,
and doesn't want it. He knows
a love that is dark
and wild, and his hand
reaches instinctively for it.
A thirsty man claims water;
the cricket, feeling the cold
that is coming,
sings of the frost.
And Rumi saw
through the eyes of his friend
even after his friend was gone.
Why should we expect
anything less from ourselves?
(Copyright Allan Cooper 1998, 2008)
posted by Al Cooper at 11:05 AM
3 Comments:
Hi Allan
I am a big fan of your first CD Walk On. I am looking for "Mud River". Can you possibly help me here?
Thanks
Terry
Hello Allan. I don't know if you remember me from our creative writing class with Herb Burke...Peter Westin. I have recently started writing poetry again after years of on again, off again, attempts. Keep up the blog.
Yes, Peter, I do remember you, very well. Send me your e-mail address and I'll send you my news. Herb died in 1995, and I published a fairly large collection of his poems through my publishing house, Owl's Head Press. my e-mail address is allancooper01@gmail.com
Post a Comment
<< Home