Jesus Christ, when he made the famous statement Cast not pearls before swine, must have meant something like “Hey buddy, don’t waste your breath. No sense talkin’ if there’s nobody listenin’.” Something like, “Speak not until ye obtain a hearing”. Something like, Don’t let a precious thing be plopped down into the porking feedlot of distraction.
Sanai, I read recently, put it this elegant way:
There isn’t enough poetry on this site. In my life. In my notebooks.
In the world.
There I was, though, minding my own business, when a Persian poem of considerable age bounced in front of my eyeballs. You might have heard of the 13th-century poet known in the West as Rumi; a century later, in Shiraz, Iran, came another gifted wordsmith and mystic lover called Hafez. The Persians revere him. Iran has a national day in his honour — imagine, for a poet. What follows, called “With That Moon Language”, is a small piece of why.
Admit something:
Everyone you see, you say to them, “Love me.”
Of course you do not do this out loud;
Otherwise, someone would call the cops.
