Hooria’s Weblog

Wealth has no permanence: it comes in the morning,
and at night it is scattered to the winds.
Physical beauty too has no importance,
for a rosy face is made pale by the scratch of a single thorn.
Noble birth also is of small account,
for many become fools of money and horses.
Many a nobleman’s son has disgraced his father by his wicked deeds.
Don’t court a person full of talent either,
even if he seems exquisite in that respect:
take warning from the example of Iblis.
Iblis had knowledge, but since his love was not pure,
he saw in Adam nothing but a figure of clay.

- Mawlana Rumi

http://www.spiritual-education.org/book3_lesson09.pdf

Where eyes encounter souls in battle-fray,
I am the murdered man whom ’twas no crime to slay.
At first look, ere love in me arose,
To that all-glorious beauty I was vowed.
God bless a racked heart crying,
And lids that passion will not let me close
And ribs worn thin,
Their crookedness wellnigh to straightness shaped
By the glow within,
And seas of tears whence I had never ’scaped

But for the fire of sighing!
How sweet are maladies which hide

Though after woeful eve came woeful dawn,
It could not move
Once to despair my spirit: I never cried
To Agony “begone!”
I yearn to every heart that passion shook
And every tongue that love made voluble,
And every deaf ear stopped against rebuke,
And every lid not dropped in slumbers dull.
Out on a love that hath no melting eyes!
Out on a flame from which no rapture flies!

Though he be gone, mine every limb beholds him
In every charm and grace and loveliness:
In music of the lute and flowing reed
Mingled in consort with melodious airs,
And in green hollows where in cool of eve
Gazelles roam browsing, or at break of morn;
And where the gathered clouds let fall their rain
Upon a flowery carpet woven of blooms;
And where at dawn with softly-trailing skirts
The zephyr brings to me his balm most sweet;
And when in kisses from the flagon’s mouth
I suck wine-dew beneath a pleasant shade 

. . . O happy, happy night in which thy vision
I hunted after with my net of waking!
The full moon, being thy copy, represented
To my unslumbering eye thy face’s image,
And in such alien form thine apparition
Cooled mine eye’s fever: I saw thee, none other,
Thus Abraham of old, the Friend of Allah,
Upturned his eye, what time he scanned the heavens.
Now is the pitchy gloom for us made dazzling,
Since thou thy splendour gav’st me for my guidance;
And when thou from mine eye in outward seeming
Art gone, I cast it inward, there to find thee.

The beauty of all things seen tempted me, saying,
“Enjoy me,” but I said “I am beyond thee.
Beguile not me, thyself by my Beloved
Distraught, in whom thou seem’st but an idea.
. . . My heart confessed His love One: then my turning
To thee were dualism, a creed I like not.”

‘Umar ibn al-Fāriḍ of Cairo (died A.H. 632/A.D. 1235)