Poetry Thursday

The Dream That Must Be Interpreted

This place is a dream.

Only a sleeper considers it real.

Then death comes like dawn,

and you wake up laughing

at what you thought was your grief.

But there's a difference with this dream.

Everything cruel and unconscious

done in the illusion of the present world,

all that does not fade away at the death-waking.

It stays,

and it must be interpreted.

All the mean laughing,

all the quick, sexual wanting,

those torn coats of Joseph,

they change into powerful wolves

that you must face.

The retaliation that sometimes comes now,

the swift, payback hit,

is just a boy's game

to what the other will be.

You know about circumcision here.

It's full castration there!

And this groggy time we live,

this is what it's like:

A man goes to sleep in the town

where he has always lived, 
and he dreams he's living

in another town.

In the dream, he doesn't remember

the town he's sleeping in his bed in.  
He believes the reality of the dream town.

The world is that kind of sleep.

The dust of many crumbled cities

settles over us like a forgetful doze,

but we are older than those cities.

                                                    
We began as a mineral.  

We emerged into plant life

and into the animal state, 
and then into being human,

and always we have forgotten our former states,

except in early spring 
when we slightly recall being green again.

                             
That's how a young person turns

toward a teacher.  That's how a baby leans

toward the breast, without knowing the secret

of its desire, yet turning instinctively.

Humankind is being led along an evolving course,

through this migration of intelligences,

and though we seem to be sleeping,

there is an inner wakefulness

that directs the dream,

and that will eventually startle us back

to the truth of who we are.

From Essential Rumi

translated by Coleman Barks