Lead Poem

Hafiz
Drunk on the Wine of the Beloved

Look at This Beauty
The beauty of this poem is beyond words.
Do you need a guide to experience the heat of the sun?
Blessed is the brush of the painter who paints
Such beautiful pictures for his virgin bride.
Look at this beauty.
There is no reason for what you see.
Experience its grace.
Even in nature there is nothing so fine.
Either this poem is a miracle, or some sort of magic trick.
Guided either by Gabriel or the Invisible Voice, inside.
No one, not even Hafiz, can describe with words
the Great Mystery.
No one knows in which shell the priceless pearl does hide.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Apology

Think me not unkind and rude,
That I walk alone in grove and glen;
I go to the god of the wood
To fetch his word to men.
Tax not my sloth that I
Fold my arms beside the brook;
Each cloud that floated in the sky
Writes a letter in my book.
Chide me not, laborious band,
For the idle flowers I brought;
Every aster in my hand
Goes home loaded with a thought.
There was never mystery,
But ’tis figured in the flowers,
Was never secret history,
But birds tell it in the bowers.
One harvest from thy field
Homeward brought the oxen strong;
A second crop thine acres yield,
Which I gather in a song.