Poem for Thursday

Last Night's Storm
By Hafiz
Translated by Inayat Khan and Coleman Barks

Last night's storm was a journey to the Beloved.
I surrender to that, the wind that
is my Friend, and my work.

Each night, the lightning flashes.
Every morning, a breeze.

Not in some protected place, but in the flood
of the heart's pumping, in the wind
of a rosebud's opening out,
that puts a small crown on each narcissus.

A tired hand collapses, exhausted,
that in the morning holds your hair again.

Peace comes when we are friends together,
remembering. Self! Your honest desire
and your benevolence free the soul
to emerge as what it is.

--------

I've locked and unlocked again my entries from yesterday about six times. Locked because those were my reactions to a meme, not a statement of my politics, not an attack on anyone, and because the things I felt compelled to say to explain myself are really not the business of all the sock puppets and multiple personalities and flame-for-flame's-sakers on LiveJournal. Now I've unlocked the first two and locked the last because that really is not the business of people who are not in some nominal way my friend, and because I've said very clearly in my user info that anything in a locked post may not be discussed outside the comments for that post in my own journal.

I've also screened a bunch of comments by non-friends so that I could reply to them out of the public arena. I'm tempted to screen every single comment and reply, but that would take hours, and I'm leaving town in two days...and maybe ranting and insulting and slamming people who might be one's friends is better than silence if those are the only alternatives. I didn't think they were, but what do I know...I'm only one person. I think there's a difference between saying I find a meme in general to be trivializing of a subject, and coming into my journal and telling me that you find ME trivial, thoughtless, heartless, etc.

I'm going out of town in two days, leaving LiveJournal for the rest of the month except for poetry and photo posts and maybe fan fiction in the unlikely event that I'm in the mood, so it's not really worth trying to start a meaningful discussion among strangers here. I had a list of links and stuff related to what I posted yesterday, survival groups and women's shelters and the like, but I'll leave it to Twinkledru and various other people who've started threads on the subject. This isn't the place for them. Really, I think, this isn't the place for ME, as opposed to Cruisedirector who posts other people's poetry and her own fan fiction and may occasionally discuss her dentist or her cats.