WHEN YOU WAKE UP TO YOURSELF

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Freedom, like a blueness announcing

dawn and all living

prostrate, you seek too early

Nocturnal, still thickens gloom

and a fragile streak of your mind

being let pass through by the Time

cautions you by the way:

slowly,  one has to get used to The Light

Blind, your soul still rests in the darkness

of your body

waiting for the cure

(and word, disputable, ruins into itself)

There is burning, burning, the Cosmos

There is blazing, the chasm of your ignorance

A step if you make too many

against cell’s wall, you will smash

hope, that alone feeds you

Warmth, nightly, still keep in your nape

and with your hand, of the prison window

fondle bar

There will come the time of Marvel

Of the Light will come the time

and then the Time of times

when you will through the gate* of 'Alî enter

Muhammad's city, blessings and peace upon him

and his offspring

city of Mustafâ

city of Abu’l-Qâssim

Awaken to yourself you will then after a long dream

regain your sight

To the Lord, perfectly, slave loyal

And thereafter you will of the freedom which you once

Madly sought

become the very essence

(when you wake up to yourself)

Sarajevo, 1982

ALLÂHUMA SALI 'ALLÂ MUHAMMADIN WA 'ALÎ MUHAMMAD!

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MUHAMMAD s.a.w.a.

*Hadîth, tradition of Prophet Muhammad (Mustafâ, Abu’l-Qâsim), Alllâh’s blessings and peace be upon him and his offspring, represents, as Henry Corbin says, "the charter of all esoterists". And just over the question of the tradition, are divided Muslim spiritualist and literalists, the latter proclaiming apocryphal every hadîth, which suggests an inner, profound meaning of the qur'anic testimonies. The poem "When You Wake Up to Yourself" evoking "the unravelling the ciphered script of Transcendence", as K. Jaspers would put it, refers to such a tradition that reads: "I am the city of knowledge and ‘Alî is the gate of it". Discovering Transcendency as a feeling of unity with It, which Husayn ibn-Mansûr al-Hallâj dared to witness, and paid for it with his life, is a moment of that self-awakening.

This discursive exposition of my poem is far from the personal, ontic singularity of the experience of the absolute slavery as an absolute freedom, whose inner announcing from the depths of Time has actually initiated its writing. Mysticism helps us to free ourselves from "the sin of existence", but a poet, that cynic of Licentia, keeps warning.

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