The Velveteen Rabbi
I wanted to make this blog entry easy for my agent and literary manager to post, as she kindly handles this website for me. I am way too down on the tech totem pole to. She manages the inbox on this website, dear Melissa.
She is just back from several months of world-traveling and will be scooting around the USA for a couple weeks now, then back to Europe, and now has lots to do. So as said, cutting this one short regarding any new & extended thoughts.
I came across this website today: Velveteen Rabbi, in searching the first line of a Hafiz poem. You can see what this woman Rabbi says about Hafiz here: Poems of praise. And she says some very fine things.
She posts about half of the very first Hafiz poem in The Subject Tonight Is Love; one of my four Hafiz books with Penguin, that I first self published in 1996, in a couple of different special editions. The next lines of that, which are not shown on her website, are equally interesting to me, in that they exemplify something I have found and tried to incorporate in many of the now some 1000 poems I have published with Penguin in seven books; and any new poems I write. Which is ...
Which is: Whenever I can, I want a poem to have utility in it. I want a poem to offer some simple undeniable physics— or metaphysics if you will, that if enacted upon will enrich you in ways you want.
This could also be said as: a good poem can help unfurl a wing— or enable your wings to better be able to taste the sky. And the word wing here can mean— your heart or spirit; and the word sky can mean: your Beloved, aka: your idea of God, Buddha, Freedom, Love, Truth, or the Great Knowing Cosmic Laughter, and the rolling through the meadows of the universes like a thousands suns, or the Sun. That sounds like the supreme vacation; I think awaits us all. Beam us up Scotty. Haven't we paid our dues enough?
Those lines that follow (what this sweet Rabbi posted of the first half of that one Hafiz poem) go— (and now formatted differently):
Habits are human nature, why not
create some that will mint gold.
Gold, the real gold, of what can make you a happier, healthier, and more talented & sweeter munchkin.
And O. I thought I was going to be able to make this blog entry short. But seems this old packhorse still has so much in his saddlebags that I am still so trying at times to get to the market to help feed, to help free. And if I reach in for just a few moonbeams ... others jump out too. Well, I hope a few did and offered a smooch!
Thanks for your time,