The Poets Neruda and Rumi and the Sufi Effendi
Thirty years ago I read a love poem by Neruda, a poet from Chile who won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
You have to remember I was a different person thirty years ago.
The poem I read was about the poet’s beautiful love, and how Neruda loved her feet. He wrote a whole poem for her, lucky her.
I believe the poem was The Feet, and here is the ending of the poem:
I love your feet
because they walked
upon the earth and upon
the wind and upon the waters,
until they found me.
This poem now doesn’t have the effect on me that it did back then.
Back then, after I read Neruda’s poem, in my emptiness — this was before I had an inkling of God — I wrote a poem called I Long for a Poet.
Here is most of my sad poem:
I long for a poet
to write about me
like Neruda did
for his love.If my poet just wrote
the first line of a poem for meIf he even thought of
writing a poem for meIf he wrote my name
on a piece of paper
somewhere…GLORIA
Thirty years later I sit in a rocker in the Sufi House.
I hear my name:
GLORIA, Effendi says.
GLORIA, Effendi says, I wonder if you would like to come to the Rumi Festival in Turkey this year?
At Effendi’s words, something very deep and physical happened to my heart, and I remembered the long-forgotten poem I had written so many years ago.
I felt that Effendi’s invitation to a Rumi festival was a response to my poem. I didn’t need a poem from a poet. A singular soul’s understanding of my heart was my quest, and Effendi answered it. How remarkable and precise. What threads of life had been woven. What miracle is this?
Effendi called my name and asked me if I wanted to go to the Rumi Festival in Turkey this year.
GLORIA, Effendi said, I wonder if you would like to come to the Rumi Festival in Turkey this year.
Godwriting is a blog by Gloria Wendroff and is about Gloria's daily life as the Godwriter of the Heavenletters project that is having a profound effect on the lives of people around the world.
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