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Jalal al-Din Rumi (courtesy of Google screenshot)
Quotable Poet readers who’ve check out the QP around the Internet know September is a big month for him for some good reasons. He founded Creative Thinkers International in the month of September to ease some of the stress people were suffering over 9/11. September is also when his books Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance and The Wisdom of W.E.B. Du Bois both came out exactly 10 YEARS AGO THIS MONTH! (Shouldn’t he be inviting everybody to a party or something? Just sayin’…)
But guess what else???! This is the birth month of the Great Mystical Sufi Poet Jalal al-Din Rumi, born on September 30, 1207. Which was what? 806 years ago. QP Aberjhani is known for celebrating the lives of great poets and he’s produced poems, essays, and book reviews about Rumi. PLUS he’s been liking and sharing Rumi-related pages on Facebook ever since Syria crossed that big red line everybody said they shouldn’t.
The poem “Time to Be the Sun” comes from the book I Made My Boy Out of Poetry. An introduction to the poem is titled “From the Book of Aberjhani Dreaming: Dancing with Rumi 4/18/95” and describes an actual dream of the QP dancing with Rumi. This is the poem posted by permission of Bright Skylark Literary Productions:
Time to Be the Sun
Wake up pretty baby.
It’s time to be the sun.
Time for us to drop
back down to earth
like old lovers
falling into new appreciation
for the soft mouth
of an attraction
that is no longer beautiful.
Open your eyes,
oh precious light.
It’s time to cry
the glorious syllables
of our past,
time to thrash and moan like dragons
breathing hot
the secret songs of our future.
We are going to the valley
where roses blush naked and wise,
we are going to the mountain
where night rolls fiercely
with an uninhibited dawn.
Wake up pretty baby,
shine bright my summer joy,
Time to be the sun
and send forth flesh
to heal the bones of time.
Time to be the woman
hauling up gold
from a heart you thought destroyed.
Time to be the man
you thought long dead
buried in waters of tortured mind.
Time to be your own faith
and give miracles to heaven.
Time to be your own truth
and pull your ass up out of hell.
Time to be the sun
and watch your soul rise pretty baby shine,
rise pretty baby shine,
rise pretty baby shine.
–from the book I Made My Boy Out of Poetry
Post by MS/25
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