Let's play a game!
Here are the rules:
I'm going to give you a fragment of poetry and your job is to guess whether it's a translation of Rumi (Fourteenth century Sufi poet from Persia) or from Billy Collins (2001-2003 US Poet Laureate) without using the internet.
1)
When I am with you, we stay up all night.
When you are not here, I cannot go to sleep.
Praise God for these two insomnias!
And the difference between them.
2)
After I had beaten my sword into a ploughshare,
I beat my ploughshare into a hoe,
then beat the hoe into a fork,
which I used to eat my dinner alone.
3)
I want to carry you
and for you to carry me
the way voices are said to carry over water
4)
In your light I learn how to love.
In your beauty, how to make poems.
You dance inside my chest,
where no one sees you,
but sometimes I do,
and that sight becomes this art.
Translations/interpretations of Rumi come from Coleman Barks's Rumi: The Book of Love. The fragments of poetry from Billy Collins come from the collection The Trouble with Poetry and Other Poems. I recently came across these two books while staying at a friend's place in Port Orchard.
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