For Mirek 2 comments

By Peggy Rosenthal

At the very moment that our friend Mirek passed from this life, 5:30 a.m. on a recent luscious summer morning, my husband George was waking up to go to the Y for his morning swim.

“What a disconnect,” George mused to me as we sat in our back yard later that day, after a neighbor had phoned to tell us that Mirek had died from the lymphoma he’d been diagnosed with only three months ago. “How could those two things be happening in the same world?”—one person following his usual morning routine unreflectively, the other embarking on the most un-routine passage that culminates every human journey.

Mirek had been raised as a Catholic in Czechoslovakia, but following on his adult emigration to the U.S. to escape Soviet rule of his country, he had increasingly been drawn to Sufi mysticism. Lately, he would attend Mass in our parish when George was preaching, while regularly sending out Sufi poems to an e-list of friends. Most of the poems were by Rumi, but it is the fourteenth century Sufi poet Hafiz who is helping me now to reflect on Mirek’s life and on the “disconnect” that George spoke of.

So many seekers of your unseen face—
the vision, still in bud, throbs with promise.

Seeking God’s unseen face: to this Hafiz dedicated his life, as did Mirek. Both shared the optimism of these lines: that the vision was a bud which would some day, somehow flower.

Hafiz wrote all his poems in couplets like this one (from the poem “Stranger”), using the classic Persian poetry form of the ghazal. The translation I’m using for this post is the new one by Jeffrey Einboden and John Slater, forthcoming from Fons Vitae Press.

Slater writes in his Introduction about the “disjunctive” play of the ghazal form:

In most ghazals, the relation of one stanza to the next is not apparent. To some degree, they are meant to stand alone, as essentially complete units, miniature poems. There is a disjunctive shock as the mind plays down the lines. Seemingly disconnected images pile up and, on repeated readings, subtly inter-resonate.

So Hafiz can write in “This and That” (as Einboden and Slater title it; Hafiz gave no titles himself):

There’s no sure foothold in this changing world,
still less on the circling spheres.

Though the treasure of our time had to come to an end
the days of separation will also pass.

Both The Police Force of True Religion and the right hand man
of the king know Hafiz as an ardent lover.

What do lovers care about the government? bring more wine,
(and forget about the rules of the Sultan, too).

Following those first two couplets on life’s transience, the poem takes a quantum leap into Police Forces and other secular powers...straw men that the poet whacks down with the force of his love of the God whom he often calls simply the “Friend.”

What lover has not been touched by the glance of the Friend?
Surely, there is no pain, and where there is pain, a gracious Healer. (from “Strangers”)

Joy in the Friend is Hafiz’s hallmark, as it was Mirek’s. “Countless holy books extolling the beauty of the Friend—/ and these no more than a letter in the alphabet,” Hafiz writes in “Stairway to the Sun.” And in “Transformation”: “At the tavern, the Friend has given me a seat of honor, / Behold! the least beggar in the city, high priest of the congregation.”

Taverns, wine-drinking: these are core images for Hafiz’s joy in life, in the life inseparable from his Friend. And yet “separation” always lurks, threatens.

In a poem that Slater titles “The Steps of Separation” (as yet unpublished), Hafiz confesses:

I used to bump my head against the ceiling of the universe
but now I lay it down upon the step of separation.

How can I spread my wings in the spacious air of union
when my heart has shed its feathers in the nest of loss?

Hafiz feared the loss and separation that are inevitable in this mortal life—as did Mirek, as do I. With Hafiz and Mirek, I long to “spread my wings in the spacious air of union.” Yet that “nest of loss” must somehow become a resting place as well.

Those “days of separation” evoked above in “This and That” are real. Yet Hafiz assures us (and himself?) that they “will also pass.”

I truly believe in the life eternal that my Christian faith promises. Yet I also cling to the lusciousness of this mortal life—as did Mirek, as did Hafiz. In his poetic mystic’s vision, Hafiz could see a deep and ultimate unity between all things material and spiritual—so that separation and disjunction dissolve. The wine that spills over in his poetry is at once the physiologically intoxicating stuff as well as the drink of divine love.

So the disconnect that George sensed between his experience and Mirek’s on that dawn morning is both a reality and illusion. As George and I spoke about it, I consciously smelled the sweet flowers of our garden and took a deep breath of the air that swirls around and through all earth’s creatures. Mirek might have said with Hafiz at that moment:

Don’t laugh at my dust-worn face and streaming eyes—
enfolding us in joy, the sky itself is made from these elements (from “The Flood”)

Mirek died at daybreak, in the spirit of Hafiz’s “Sacked and Plundered”:

At daybreak the breeze carried a faint perfume, the fragrant hair of the beloved
sweeping my anxious heart into the new day, awake and ready for work.