The following poem by14th century poet and mystic, Hafiz, sums all this up quite beautifully:
Absolutely Clear
Don’t surrender your loneliness
So quickly.
Let it cut more deep.
Let it ferment and season you
As few human
Or even divine ingredients can.
Something missing in my heart tonight
Has made my eyes so soft,
My voice
So tender,
My need of God
Absolutely
Clear.
Jalaluddin Rumi
Rumi was a 13th-century Persian poet, jurist, Islamic scholar, theologian, and Sufi mystic. His poems have been widely translated into many of the world’s languages, and he has been described as the most popular poet and the best-selling poet in the United States.
“There is a loneliness more precious than life. There is a freedom more precious than the world. Infinitely more precious than life and the world is that moment when one is alone with God.”
A holocaust poem
Miklos Radnoti
HOW OTHERS SEE…
How others see this region, I cannot understand:
to me, this little country is menaced motherland
engulfed by flames, the world of my childhood swaying far,
and I am grown from this land as tender branches are
from trees. And may my body sink into this soil in the end.
When plants reach out towards me, I greet them as a friend
and know their names and flowers. I am at home here, knowing
the people on the road and why and where they are going –
and how I know the meaning when, by a summer lane,
the sunset paints the walls with a liquid flame of pain!
The pilot cannot help seeing a war map from the sky,
he can’t tell below the home of Vörösmarty Mihály;*
what can he identify there? grim barracks and factories,
but I see steeples, oxen, farms, grasshoppers and bees;
his lens spies out the vital production plants, the fields,
but I can see the worker, afraid below, who shields
his labour, a singing orchard, a vineyard and a wood,
among the graves a granny mourning her widowhood;
and what may seem a plant or a rail line that must be wrecked
is just a signal-house with the keeper standing erect
and waving his red flag, lots of children around the guard;
and a shepherd dog might roll in the dust in a factory yard;
and there’s the park with the footprints of past loves and the flavour
of childhood kisses – the honey, the cranberry I still savour,
and on my way to school, by the kerbside, to postpone
a spot-test one certain morning, I stepped upon a stone:
look! There’s the stone whose magic the pilot cannot see
for no instrument would merge it in his topography.
True, guilty are we all here, our people as the rest,
we know our faults, we know how and when we have transgressed,
but there are blameless lives too of toil and poetry and passion,
and infants also, with infinite capacity for compassion –
they will protect its glow while in gloomy shelters until
once more our land is marked out by the finger of peace, then they will
respond to our muffled words with new voices fresh and bright.
Spread your vast wings above us, protective cloud of night.
(Jan. 17, 1944)
- Mihály Vörösmarty (1800-1855), poet