Heather Swan – Another Day Filled with Sleeves of Light

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Illustrating the Sufis’ aspiration, in the thirteenth century, the Persian Sufi poet Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi wrote the suggestive imagery of  “An ocean wooing a drop!”: As a returning raindrop comes to dance within the waters of the ocean from which it first rose, the Sufi seeks to know divinity, the source, as a wholly direct experience, unmediated by the intellect or authority figures. The ocean is the Ultimate, continuously calling to us each, the individual drops, for connection and reunion within our lifetimes, now. Here. Heather Swan’s, Another Day Filled with Sleeves of Light, embodies the spirit of Rumi. First, the evocative image of ripening fruit yearning to be tasted, and we recall the truth that we humans, too, yearn for such intimacy of being entirely, wholly known. The poem then concludes with an encouraging question: In our time alive, what if we trusted just as the falling raindrop trusts the holding of the approaching ocean? Just as the leaf releases with trust, riding the currents toward the embrace of the awaiting, loving beyond.

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Another Day Filled with Sleeves of Light

and I carry ripened plums, 
waiting to find the one 
who is interested in tasting. 

How can we ever be known? 

Today the lily sends up 
a fifth white-tipped tendril, the promise 
of another flower opening, 
and I think, this must mean this plant 
is happy, here, in this house, by this window. 
Is this the right deduction? 

The taller plant leans and leans toward the light. 
I turn it away, and soon its big hands are reaching again 
toward what nourishes it, 
but that it can never touch. 

Couldn’t the yellowing leaves of the maple 
and their falling also be a sign of joy? 
Another kind of leaning into. 
A letting go of one thing 
to fall into another. A kind of trust I cannot imagine.

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