WE head into the Christmas season with a sense of expectance, of hope, of gratitude, an idea that this week is different to all others in the calendar. Cutting loose from schedule is cutting free and yet there is mystery in the divine. You either get Christ’s arrival on Earth, or not.
Marian O’Rourke, a Limerick born poet, has a piece in the 2014 anthology, ‘Dream of a City’. It is suggestive of exploration, festive times and ultimately, peace.
Her ‘Villanelle for a Sufi Master’ is not a dance – or perhaps it is a dance of words on dancing. A villanelle is no gavotte but a tightly structured form confined to 19 lines of five tercets followed by a quatrain. There’s more: look for two refrains and two repeating rhymes, with the first and third line of the first tercet repeated alternately until the last stanza, which includes both repeated lines.
O’Rourke wraps this wonderfully well around the abstract.
In traditional Sufi dance, the dancer rotates from right to left, over time making it possible to touch the divine presence out of body.
Villanelle for a Sufi Master
I never thought that I could dance before/ I met a master of The Sufi Way./ He taught me how to breathe and move and soar.
A long, long search, I knocked on many doors,/ then crossed the threshold that before me lay./ I always doubted that I could dance before.
My skirts are loose and loose the hair I wear,/when on his drum hypnotic pulses play./ He taught me how to breathe, and move and soar.
All inner burdens I attend no more,/ but welcome each and every perfect day/ I always doubted I could dance before
Unending rhythms probed my very core,/ refreshed my heart and held me in their sway/ until I learned to breathe and move and soar.
I know I’ve found what I was looking for,/ my body now an instrument of prayer./ I always doubted I could dance before./ He taught me how to breathe, and move and soar.
Editor’s note, from Sufi doctrine:
“The sickness that is afflicting your heart is one of those things which strike men whom God loves, for ‘of all men the most sorely tried are the Prophets, after them the saints, then those who resemble them, closely or remotely.’ So do not be downcast, since this happens most often to men full of sincerity and love, to cause them to go forward towards their Lord”.
