A voice speaks to Zulnoon
Zulnoon said: “I was in the desert once.
Trusting in God, I’d brought no sustenance –
I came on forty men ahead of me,
Dressed all in rags, a closed community.
My heart was moved. ‘O God,’ I cried, ‘take heed,
What wretched lives you make your pilgrims lead!’
‘We know their life and death,’ A voice replied;
‘We kill these pilgrims first; when they have died
We compensate them for the blood we shed.’
I asked, ‘When will this killing stop?’ He said:
‘When my exchequer has no love to give,
While I can pay for death they shall not live,
I drink my servant’s blood and he is hurled
In frenzied turbulence about the world –
Then when he is destroyed and cannot find
His head, his feet, his passions or his mind,
I clothe him in the splendor he has won
And grace enfolds him, radiant as the sun:
Though I will have his face bedaubed by blood,
A starved ascetic smeared with dust and mud,
A denizen of shadows and the night –
Yet I will rise before him robed in light,
And when that sun, My countenance, is here
What can these shadows do but disappear?’”
Shadows are swallowed by the sun, and he
Who’s lost in God is from himself set free;
Don’t chatter about loss – be lost! Repent,
And give up vain, self-centered argument;
If one can lose the Self in all the earth
No other being can approach his worth.
Pages 130-131
Fariduddin Attar, The Conference of the Birds
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