What Substance 

By Jalaluddin Rumi

O my restless heart! Tell the truth! 

What substance are you?
Are you fire or water?
Are you human or pure spirit? 

From what direction have you come?
What food have you eaten?
What have you witnessed in annihilation? 

And why are you flying toward annihilation? 

Why are you uprooting me?
Why are you planning to erase me? 

Why are you ambushing my intellect? 

And why are you defaming yourself? 

All animals and creatures
are afraid of nonexistence, 

except you who are setting off 

toward nonexistence. 

Wayfaring with such energy, 

intoxicated, completely drunk, 

when do you heed any warning? 

Or buy anyone’s sweet talk? 

From the top of this world’s mountain, 

you are the flood flowing down
toward the sea of nonexistence,
flowing more smoothly than my breath. 

The garden and spring are bewildered, 

wondering what breeze is blowing you.
The lily and the cypress are enraptured by you, 

wondering what flower, what narcissus you are! 

The sound of a tambourine whose jingling disks 

are not accompanying its rim
would not get into our ears,
like the delirious raving of an infidel 

that we take no heed of. 

The Moses of your love told me, 

become Do not touch me.
Why should I not flee from everyone? 

Why should I not escape from Sameri? 

I have fled from everyone,
though I am in the midst of the crowd, 

just like a Ja’fari gold coin
in a mine deep within the earth. 

If gold yells two thousand times, “I am gold!” 

it won’t find a buyer
as long as it does not get out of the mine. 

By Jalaluddin Rumi (Divani Shamsi Tabrizi 2480), translated by Kabir Helminski and Ahmad Rezwani, in Love’s Ripening: Rumi on the Heart’s Journey (Shambhala Publications, 2008)