SUFI SAYINGS

For years I carried around in my pocket
a small slip of lined blue paper on which
Robert Bly had written in his fine
decorative hand the sentence Remember
that silence is veering away.  I’d fished it
out of his wastebasket, my habit
the decades I worked for him.  He didn’t mind.
Robert’s wastebasket was a cornucopia.
I think that sentence may have been a Sufi
saying.  Robert also liked this one:  Everything
is passing away except the Face.
You might notice the change he rang on that
in his prose poem “The Mushroom”:  “Everything
is passing away except the day of this
wedding.”  He meant the wedding that is coming
to us all.  The slip of blue paper
now lives on my bulletin board.  
Current events bring to mind one more
Sufi saying Robert favored:  Let others
eat shit, you go on saying the Holy
Name.  His translation, without a doubt.
And when we’ve forgotten the Holy Name?
Isn’t that what this country is all about?
We are so afraid of the silence.

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Thomas R. Smith

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