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[Poetry Chaikhana] Francis Brabazon - Dawn is a Friend
Here's your Daily Poem from the Poetry Chaikhana --
 | Dawn is a Friend By Francis Brabazon
Dawn is a friend who comes to rouse the lover from grief,
 / Photo by nattu / |
| ============ Thought for the Day: All the world ============ | Here's your Daily Music selection --  Prem Joshua & Chintan Ahir |
Hi Omss -
Not long ago I stepped in from watching the morning sun, bright, cool, and clear in the winter sky. This poem, with it's dawn imagery, caught my attention.
Dawn is a friend who comes to rouse the lover from grief,
And enemy, for from his pain he wants no relief.
That first line of the couplet invites us to breath easier, for dawn rouses the lover, the spiritual seeker, from his grief. But then the second line turns our expectations upside-down and says dawn is actually an enemy because the lover doesn't want relief from his pain. Why? What is his grief? Why is it experienced at night? And why does he want no relief from that pain?
Many forms of Sufi practice involve zikr, or "remembrance," which is usually understood as meditation and the chanting of the holy names of God through the middle of the night. When the relationship with God is a love affair, night is the time of secret trysts ("The deep night breathes quietly as a woman sleeping"). Night is the time of the most intense and intimate spiritual practice.
The challenge in most spiritual practice is that it brings us, at some point, to an extremely vulnerable stage when we have to confront the foundation of suffering -- which is the perception of separation from God. All of life's pain ultimately stems from that basic sense of separation. Most people instinctively run from that awareness, spend their entire lives in constructing elaborate psychic ways of blocking that awareness. But the crazy lovers of God turn around, night after night, and sit themselves down on the cliff edge and sing out into the great gulf. Though frightened, the true lover stares endlessly into that great space until suddenly an amazing thing happens -- in a flash the emptiness is seen to be not a distance but a connection, a joining. The gulf is itself the bridge spanning the distance, and we discover that we can walk upon it, that there was, in fact, never any separation or distance.
Without separation's pain how can he be aware
Of the Beloved's presence in the perfumed air?
Separation is itself the connection to the Beloved.
And don't you love that closing couplet...?
In the silence continues the siege of the Beloved's beauty;
And his soul's sigh steals out and goes on sentry duty.>/i>
silence/siege Beloved/beauty
soul/sigh/steal sentry/duty
The words build up to that final rhyme in such a sensuous way...
==
Francis Brabazon was born in London. His father was inspired by the utopian ideals of William Morris, and moved the entire family to the Australian countryside when Francis was still a boy.
As Francis grew into adolescence, he grew to love the natural world that surrounded him, and he began to write his first poetry.
Francis was still a teenager when the famous droughts and rabbit plagues that affected large portions of Australia wiped out the family farm, and the entire family moved to Melbourne. In the city, he was exposed to many of the great artists of the time, and he soon saw his life as a quest to discover and express beauty through art.
In the 1940's, he became interested in Eastern spirituality and soon became a student of a Sufi shaikh. With the death of his Sufi teacher in the early 1950's, Brabazon became the head of the Sufi Movement in Australia.
About this time, Francis Brabazon met the Indian spiritual master Meher Baba, who had become the leader of the Sufi Movement that Brabazon belonged to. Brabazon made several trips to India to be with Meher Baba, eventually staying with him for ten years.
Meher Baba was a great lover of the ecstatic Sufi poets, like Hafiz and others, and he encouraged Francis Brabazon to write poetry along similar lines. Brabazon came to be known as "Meher Baba's poet."
Perhaps his best-known work is Stay With God, a book-length poem of devotion to Meher Baba and the spiritual path. In Dust I Sing, another much-loved (but hard to find) collection, is composed of Sufi ghazals written in English.
Ivan
PS - I just found out that one of my poems is featured on the home page of the Tiferet Journal website. Take a look...
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Ivan M. Granger's original poetry, stories and commentaries are Copyright © 2002 - 2011 by Ivan M. Granger.
All other material is copyrighted by the respective authors, translators and/or publishers.
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