Time ...

Years are needed before the sun
working on a Yemeni rock
can make a bloodstone.

Months must pass before cotton seed
can provide a seamless shroud.

Days go by before a handful of wool becomes a halter rope.

Decades it takes a child
to change into a poet.

And civilizations fall and are ploughed under
to grow a garden on the ruins,
the true mystic.


- Sanai

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Colman Barks translation from
“The Hands of Poetry”