The Mnemosyne Weekly: Poem Six (Rumi)

Photo by Josep Renalias

It's the 9th of April, which means that anyone participating in NoPoWriMo is on their 9th poem of the month. In honor of your simultaneous exhaustion and exhilaration, and my own, I've chosen an incredibly beautiful and delightfully short poem for this week, an untitled snippet from the Sufi poet Jalal al-Din Rumi. This ecstatic  celebration of creativity will wake us back up to all that is alive in poetry, and it will give us the second wind we need to continue to write through the month.

Please keep making comments in the sections under the postings. I enjoy hearing your experiences of the poems as much as I enjoy memorizing them. I'm keeping my own comments about the poems restricted to these sections, as well, so that we can approach the new poems with clean, fresh, beginner's minds each week. 

Here is last week's posting, if you want to leave comments about Rich's "What Kind of Times Are These ": The Mnemosyne Weekly: Poem Five. Also, if you're new to the blog, you might want to look at the first Mnemosyne Post to find out what this project is all about. 

Here ya go. Enjoy!

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty

and frightened. Don't open the door to the study

and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.

There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

*Translated by Coleman Barks.