Rumi-- truly great poet... just ran across these and had to put them up.

Short Poems of Rumi


The temple of love is not love itself;
True love is the treasure,
Not the walls about it.
Do not admire the decoration,
But involve yourself in the essence,
The perfume that invades and touches you-
The beginning and the end.
Discovered, this replace all else,
The apparent and the unknowable.
Time and space are slaves to this presence.



Light Up The Fire

I gaze into the heart, lowly it may be,
Thought the words be higher still.
For the heart is all the substance,
The speech an accident.
How many phrases will you speak,
Too many for me.
How much burning, burning will you feel,
Be friendly with the fire, enough for me.
Light up the fire of love inside,
And blaze the thoughts away.

http://www.shortpoems.org/poets/rumi/sh ... _rumi.html

Nothing in this whole writing area for a long time, so what the hell. I've only done this once before--put up some of my own writing, but... I recently saw a devastating photo that moved me to finish a poem I'd been sitting on for YEARS! I sometimes recycle only lines or stanzas from poems and throw the rest out, even after keeping them for a long while. But I'm glad I kept this cuz I ended up with a political poem that just might actually get away with being political. (Usually, any writing that's political in any way isn't even looked at--anywhere!)

Warning: There's a disturbing photo below, a reminder of what war really looks like, which they seem to have totally banished from all our media; did you notice?

Oh, and yes, this poem is copyrighted (which can be proven). Oh, and in case you didn't know, the concept of complicity is that the dispossessed are partly to blame for their own dispossession. (Which sometimes has its place, sure, but I wanted to be sure we kept some balance or something?)



Complicity

Blue Heron stands in rented waters,
abetting Landlord’s industrial proceeds
twenty-two miles upstream.

She lifts a leg, improvisational dancer,
halfway, back, then bent, a curl of gold.
Dips a languorous beak into the toxic profits,

throws it back like Isadora’s scarf.
But what greasy wheel is this?
Her perjurous silken wings unfurl

like the seductive flags of nations
calling for the eye-glinting hubcaps of war,
for whoop and holler, lunge and lucre,

all the onward axels of death.
She flies toward oblivion with her own
blue wings, her own henchman beak.

Young girl walks a ruined street
in the mealy-mouthed Mideast, with
the search and destroy sun at full alert.

Town collateral testifies to the cockeyed
transgressions of her people, and
their consequent corrections, but she

elects to stroll to the well with a pot.
Not yet in full bloom, still old enough
to understand the rules of engagement.

She prefers to risk blood for water,
defying curfew, and everyone knows
such acts make insurgencies grow.

As her skull spills brain, two more malcontents
show up, wailing; ground zero is wherever
you fall yourself, unless you’re a parent.