Only Breath

Mewlana Jalaluddin Rumi 1207 (Balkh) – 1273 (Konya )



Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu
Buddhist, sufi, or zen. Not any religion

or cultural system. I am not from the East
or the West, not out of the ocean or up

from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not
composed of elements at all. I do not exist,

am not an entity in this world or in the next,
did not descend from Adam and Eve or any

origin story. My place is placeless, a trace
of the traceless. Neither body or soul.

I belong to the beloved, have seen the two
worlds as one and that one call to and know,

first, last, outer, inner, only that
breath breathing human being.

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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on May 03, 2023

35 sec read
469

Quick analysis:

Scheme AX XX XX XX XX AX XX
Closest metre Iambic hexameter
Characters 579
Words 117
Stanzas 7
Stanza Lengths 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2

Mewlana Jalaluddin Rumi

Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī also known as Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Balkhī, and more popularly simply as Rumi, was a 13th-century Persian poet, faqih, Islamic scholar, theologian, and Sufi mystic originally from Greater Khorasan in Greater Iran. more…

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