The Tavern

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Image of the Week

All day I think about it, then at night I say it. Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing? I have no idea. My soul is from elsewhere, I\'m sure of that, And I intend to end up there.

This drunkenness began in some other tavern. When I get back around to that place, I\'ll be completely sober. Meanwhile, I\'m like a bird from another continent, sitting in this aviary. The day is coming when I fly off, But who is it now in my ear who hears my voice? Who says words with my mouth?

Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul? I cannot stop asking.

If I could taste one sip of an answer, I could break out of this prison for drunks. I didn\'t come here of my own accord, and I can\'t leave that way. Whoever brought me here will have to take me home.

This poetry. I never know what I\'m going to say. I don\'t plan it. When I\'m outside the saying of it, I get very quiet and rarely speak at all.

We have a huge barrel of wine, but no cups. That\'s fine with us. Every morning We glow and in the evening we glow again.

They say there\'s no future for us. They\'re right.

Which is fine with us.

--Rumi

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6 Past Reflections
JO
John
Oct 30, 2025
If only he knew about Jesus Christ and His Church, with the Sacraments instituted for our salvation. That is the "wine" he was to drink, the blood of Christ. I used to love this poem. I now regard it as tragic. Still a great poem of a profound spiritual search. Rumi: Always seeking, never finding the way, the Truth, and the life.
CD
Chris Daniel
Dec 25, 2022
Rumi's "Tavern" and Wordsworth's "Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" both impress with profound insight. While Rumi regards Earth as a tavern in which our souls can neither arrive or leave of our own accord, but instead must wait for whoever brought us here to take us home, Wordsworth regards our births as a sleep and a (partial) forgetting... Both Rumi and Wordsworth consider our souls return home (to God, or whoever/whatever), but Wordsworth also eludes to reincarnation with the line "...the soul that rises with us, our life’s star, hath had elsewhere its setting and cometh from afar..." And much, much more besides. Rumi's Tavern is brief while Wordsworth's Ode is much longer and deeper and well worth checking out if, like Rumi, you think about it all day, say it at night, and ponder where we come from. What's the expression: We are not human beings having spiritual experiences, but are instead spiritual beings having human experiences?
JB
John Bushnell Apr 22, 2023
Just a note on the Rumi poem. One of the central mysteries of Sufism is: if Allah/God is one, and we participate in that intimately, where does this experience of self as separate being come from? Rumi is always talking about the Wine of Love. By this, he is referring to zikr, the Sufi ceremony of remembrance. He is forced to refer to it metaphorically because it is an experience beyond the mind, of a greater order of magnitude than mind. This is the glowing he refers to, zikr done morning and evening.
DD
daan dehn
Aug 8, 2020
Every fibre of my being screams each syllable as the gospel truth. I only wrote it yesterday.
KE
Ken Oct 31, 2025
daan dehn, I would like to reconnect with you, renowned "citizen of the universe, jack of all trades, master of twenty-seven". (Yes, I kept your "business" card for all these years!) Similarly inclined, are you?
FA
Faryana Asghari
Feb 27, 2020
Thank you! I need this poems original In ifarsi. Can you help me?