Love is more powerful than death. We are renewed (especially those of us living through a Midwestern winter!) in the approaching of spring and Easter, and since poetry has a way of saying things that cannot otherwise be expressed, I share with you this English translation of a Rumi poem.
Spring is Christ
Everyone has eaten and fallen asleep.
The house is empty.
We walk out to the garden to let the apple
meet the peach, to carry messages
between rose and jasmine.
Spring is Christ,
raising martyred plants from their shrouds.
A leaf trembles. I tremble
in the wind-beauty like silk from Turkestan.
The censer fans into flame.
This wind is the Holy Spirit.
The trees are Mary.
Watch how husband and wife play subtle games
with their hands. Strings of cloudy pearls
are thrown across the lovers,
as is the marriage custom.
We talk about this and that. There is no rest
except on these branching moments.
[Jelaluddin Rumi, the 13th Century Persian Sufi philosopher-poet, is believed by some to be the most widely read poet in America]
