Minute Eight

The final two poems of commemorating the last moments of George Floyd’s life will shift from poems of protest to poems of solidarity.

 

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Day eight, minute eight. We are near the end. He lays silent and still in the street. He is alone, he is in this moment friendless, he has no one to hold his hand or comfort him or gaze upon him with love as he breathes his last. It is a horror.

 

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Only Breath

by Rumi

 

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.

 

 

 

I’m drawn to this poem more than I really understand it. There’s balm here, a resting spot to breathe calmly as we take in a world where a black man, as so many before him, was denied the right to breathe, who begged another man to let him breathe.

 

In this time of division, with so many people aching to rid the world of division and the injustice and pain division brings, Rumi wipes the slate clean. There is a reality beyond division, he says. Beyond the division of religion and country of origin. He just as easily could be talking about divisions of ethnicity, skin tone, political party, social class.

 

This reality exists even beyond the divisions between species and between beings from this world and the next.

 

It’s the reality of being beloved. Of existing in a state of being loved.

 

I belong to the beloved, have seen the two

worlds as one

 

We are the beloved, all of us, and every last atom of creation. And if you don’t believe in a loving creative entity, there is still the fact of love itself, the fact that it has always existed and always will, the miracle of it, the power of it.

 

I stop here with the poem because I can’t understand the last lines about the breath and I keep hearing John Donne in my ear—

 

No man is an island entire of itself; every man

is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;

if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe

is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as

well as any manner of thy friends or of thine

own were; any man’s death diminishes me,

because I am involved in mankind.

And therefore never send to know for whom

the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

 

Emphasis mine. Going to repeat it.

 

any man’s death diminishes me,

because I am involved in mankind.

 

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A biography of Rumi from a previous post:

Rumi, born to a wealthy family in 1207, eventually settled in modern day Turkey.  He wrote over 70,000 verses in 25 years or, as I figure, about 7 ½ poems every day.  A religious figure, he is considered a Muslim saint.  His staying power comes not only from the beauty and emotional expressiveness of his poems, but his teachings of tolerance and peace.  He’s such towering figure of interfaith unity that Pope John XXIII was moved to say in 1958, “In the name of the Catholic World, I bow with respect before the memory of Rumi.”