Stop Being So Religious by Hafiz
by Steven McCabe
What
Do sad people have in
Common?
It seems
They have all built a shrine
To the past
And often go there
And do a strange wail and
Worship.
What is the beginning of
Happiness?
It is to stop being
So religious
Like
That.
Translation by Daniel Ladinsky
The animal figure was originally a shadow puppet created last year by a Grade 8 student in a small Ontario town. I delivered a poetry and shadow puppetry workshop & we created a quite striking multi media production. I decided to experiment with a photo taken during the workshop. Simultaneously I discovered this Hafiz poem which follows the previous post by Rumi very elegantly.
poemimage 
As always: thoughtful, intelligent, provocative.
Thank you Jim. I appreciate your thoughts. Now I’m thinking about Hafiz, in the light of you being a musician and composer, and thinking I could have called this post ‘Visual variations on a Hafiz composition.’
Very nice, Steven. I am enjoying your expressions of the sufi mystics. I wonder, is the Bull a reference to Israel making a golden calf at the base of Mount Sinai – worshipping the past when God was right there on the mountain?
Thanks Jack. In all honesty I don’t know why (out of all the creatures in photographs of the shadow puppets) I chose the bull.
The things I associate ‘the bull’ with don’t seem to cross-reference with Sufi mystics. You might be onto something with this suggestion. But if so it was a corner of my subconscious whispering very, very quietly.