15 quotes
Before this there was one heart
but a thousand thoughts
Now all is reduced to
"There is no God but God."
The magic spring
that gives eternal Life,
is in your own heart
but you have blocked the flow.
Love plays its lute behind the screen —
where is a lover to listen to its tune?
Fakhruddin Iraqi: Divine Flashes (1982)
The world has spilled Love's secret —
when could music ever hold its tongue?
Every atom babbles the mystery —
Listen yourself, for I'm no tattletale!
Fakhruddin Iraqi: Divine Flashes (1982)
Since we have quaffed
the beaker of Thy love, we yield our hearts
and make our Lives Thy ransom: since we come
again into Thy street, we turn our backs
on all that is, save Thee.
I am Love: in heaven and earth I have no place;
I am the Wondrous Phoenix whose spoor cannot be traced.
Fakhruddin Iraqi: Divine Flashes (1982)
Expressions are many
but Thy loveliness is one;
Each of us refers
to that single Beauty.
Love the phoenix cannot be trapped
nor in heaven or earth can it be named;
no one has yet discovered its address:
its desert holds not a single footprint.
Fakhruddin Iraqi: Divine Flashes (1982)
Know yourself: a cloud
drifting before your sun.
Cut yourself off from your senses
and behold your sun of intimacy.
The world but seems to be
yet is nothing more
than a line drawn
between light and shadow.
Decipher the message
of this dream-script
and learn to distinguish time
from Eternity.
Fakhruddin Iraqi: Divine Flashes (1982)
There is no God but Love.
The Beloved's Loveliness owns
a hundred thousand faces;
gaze upon a different fair one
in every atom;
for She needs must show
to every separate thing
a different aspect
of Her beauty.
By day I praised You
but never knew it;
by night slept with You
without realising;
fancying myself
to be myself;
but no, I was You
and never knew it.
It speaks to me in the silence of this one
then through the words of that one speaking;
it whispers to me through an eyebrow raised
and the message of an eye winking.
Fakhruddin Iraqi: Divine Flashes (1982)
They look, they see, but do not comprehend.
They take no pleasure in the View,
For to enjoy it one must know
through the Truth of Certainty
What he is seeing,
through Whom, and why.