Please Come Home Read online

  Please come home

  Poetry to open the heart, nourish the soul and transform the mind

  Guthema Roba

  North Star Press of St. Cloud, Inc.

  St. Cloud, Minnesota

  Copyright © 2013 Guthema Roba

  All rights reserved.

  Print ISBN: 978-0-87839-678-8

  eBook ISBN: 978-087839-832-4

  First edition: June 1, 2013

  Published by

  North Star Press of St. Cloud, Inc.

  P.O. Box 451

  St. Cloud, MN 56302

  www.northstarpress.com

  To my precious wife and companion, Aster Tilahun (Astroid), and my daughter Homa.

  You have been the garden of kindness and love. I have grown and refined so much ever since you entered my life. I am very grateful.

  To my beloved friends

  Ursa Karp (Sattva), Donna Ronning, Meski Mebatsion, Gera Getachew, Helena Tadesse, Paul Goldman,

  Aseffa Ayele, Mardy Bryant, Yonas Mbatsion,

  Louis Alemayehu, Deva Michele MCcune,

  Anne Ekeberg, Biniam Egu Bedasso,

  Rose Marie Raccioppi, Charen Surdhar,

  Ramana Spencer, Berhanemeskel Dejene,

  Eyasu Tarekegn, Leslie Read, Daniel Amare,

  Oriya Rohr, Maggie Shea, Renee Reed, Princess Lucy, Guye Jima, Maureen Millea Smith, Barbara Jean,

  Anugraha Hamblin, Jana Dular, Allison Dorhman, Yigebashal Kass, Haminia Haar, Hannah Jones,

  Christian Korn, Demitu Argo, Diane Moe,

  Mahder Koru, Michael McConnell, Emebet Bekele, Janet Tarkow, Lynn Tarkow, Carolyn Kaehr,

  Mary McMahon, Father Bill Whittier,

  Hanspeter Hopperger, staff of the Golden Valley

  library, friends of the Golden Valley library and many more whose names I have not mentioned here—your support and love continue to touch me deeply.

  Thank you for choosing to be beautiful.

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  It Is Time for You

  This Brief Moment

  Your Happiness

  Labor within Labor

  Sweet Bewilderment

  Face of Stillness

  Overwatering Your Cabbage

  This Boring Room

  What Has the Tree Lost

  Gemstone

  Waiting for the Rooster

  Ripples

  You Are the Change

  On Her Way to a Market Place

  Wherever I Move

  Earth and Rain

  Grace Can Find You Anywhere

  Like Any Other Kids

  Whatever You Lose or Gain

  If You Want Serenity

  Emptiness

  The Space Between My Fingers

  Lump of Sugar

  Life Holds a Bowl to Your Eyes

  The Flower and the Sun

  Rising Beyond Time

  Judgment Day

  Someone Sweet Has Kissed Us

  Let It Be from Here

  From a Place of No-Thought

  Something Inside

  If We Really Listen

  Grace

  The Wine of Closeness

  Does Not Matter

  How to Cry with Joy

  Together

  The Moon in Love

  A Poet’s Responsibility

  Don’t Go to Sleep

  Visit

  I Am Not in Charge

  Remember

  Meeting with a Friend

  Simplicity

  Lotus

  Herb and Spices

  The Sun

  The Road

  After We’re Gone

  Each Step

  We Walk towards Ourselves

  True Lover

  God’s Brilliant Jokes

  Marry the Mystery

  Artificial Sweeteners

  You and I Are One

  Start All Over

  Combing Love

  When You Breathe

  You Never Say a Word

  The Burning

  Old Way of Living

  The One

  Drum

  Tell Me

  Naked

  These Eyes

  The Harp

  If at All

  The Union

  Milk from Cactus Tree

  The Healing Tree Speaks

  Centipedes and Earthworms

  This Sweetness

  Window of Your Mind-Body

  Rosemary Garden

  Be a Sweet Poem

  Concrete Roads

  From the Ego’s Side

  Because You Are Here

  You’re a Symphony

  What Are You Doing to Me?

  Expansive Heart

  Your Name

  Whatever You Don’t Say

  Leaves in the Storm

  The Line

  Be Here

  Your Brilliant Servant

  All Day

  You Contain Everything

  Eventually

  The Portal

  Traffic Jam

  Seed

  How Long

  New Year’s Resolution

  Daily Race

  When You See the Moon

  Temporary Enchantment

  The Heart Does Not Plan

  Love Moves In

  Your Miraculous Strength

  Beyond Belief

  Old Messages

  A Mountain across the Street

  Pure Space

  Please Come Home

  All Is Divine

  Beauty of the Beloved

  The Most Sincere Service

  Introduction

  The moment you teach a child the name of a bird, that child will never see that bird.

  —Jiddu Krishnamurti

  We walk down the street or turn on our TV and see a thousand faces full of suppressed tensions and worries. In the marketplace, at the malls, at work places and schools, there is fear, insecurity and resentment. In Africa, the Middle East, Asia and elsewhere there are cycles of dictatorial regimes, corruption, wars, greed and drug trafficking. Inside each household, there are dysfunctional relationships, domestic violence, addictions, homicides and depression.

  An adult’s mind does not like to be in the Now. It chooses to be either in the past or the future. We’re always waiting for something special to happen. We believe we have to acquire something in order to be happy. For instance, we have to get a job or a partner to be happy. While waiting for something to happen, we miss the flow of life because life happens only in this moment.

  Early in the mornings, freeways are jammed with people who drive to work they don’t enjoy any more. In many cultures, there is so much fear of aging, death and dying. This is because there is a very strong attachment with the physical world or the form and most humans think they are their body.

  The world is in a dream state of consciousness and humans have forgotten who they are and where they come from. There is a great disconnection. In other words, they’ve walked away from what really matters most and by doing so they are not available to life. They’ve torn themselves from nature. They try to solve every problem with the mind that has created it. If we need to describe what the mind is, it si
mply means the accumulation of stories we have been gathering ever since we were born. Depending on how we were raised, most of us have crammed so many stories while others might have collected less. The more stories you collect, the more conditioned you become. This is what is commonly known as education. Here, we can call it domestication. If you meet a ten-year-old child and ask how he is doing, he will tell you that he is bored. If you want to know why, he would say, life sucks. That’s it! Life sucks. Imagine, he is only ten years old and life has become meaningless for him already. I am in my mid-forties now and I am still madly in love with life. I get up in the mornings and find myself genuinely intoxicated by the beauty of life. And then so much space opens up, through which poetry flows like milk and honey. I still experience challenges, but I no longer see a challenge as an enemy. I see them as friends who emerge to wake me up, to sharpen and refine me so that I can move through life easily.

  When you were born, you were a pure diamond, pure space. As you grow up and turn into a teen and then into an adult, the diamond becomes completely covered with dust and you no longer shine and you forget who you are. At this point, you need a friend who can remind you, a friend who can help you polish the diamond. Sometimes poetry can be that friend.

  For me poetry is not a hobby. It is an everyday dance of existence, a walk towards your heart. It is a bridge connecting the lover with the beloved or the ocean with the one who’s thirsty.

  Each poem in this book is a daily celebration, a reminder of your own beauty. They are invitations for you to wake up from the state of deep sleep and know who you are. Don’t try to understand them nor bring any stories or images into them. They will become static and won’t flow through you. Feel them with all your body and be fully open. Let the act of deep listening take over. They are short but they penetrate deeper and evoke a hidden source of joy inside you. They need to be read over and over again until every single atom inside of you wakes up and heals. At the end of the day, you will realize that love is not anywhere out there. Peace is not anywhere out there. Kindness and understanding are not anywhere out there. All of these qualities are deep within you and not separate from who you are. It is home and you are inside it. Please come home.

  Blessings,

  Guthema Roba

  It Is Time for You

  I tell you

  the splendor you are

  Can deeply touch someone today

  And it is time for you to go out in the

  Street and shine.

  If you’ve already noticed the world

  Acting absurdly and insanely,

  Knocking into each other in their dreams,

  It is because some kind of hunger or thirst

  Is hitting hard.

  And you are the nourishment, my friend,

  the bread for deep longing like this one.

  You are the wine and fresh milk and

  It is time for you to go out in the

  Street and sing.

  * * *

  This Brief Moment

  Oh beloved one!

  The beauty of your heart’s song

  the light your eyes emit

  smashes thousand eggs open.

  Just this brief moment in the sun

  this brief moment

  is an eternity,

  it is like sitting under the sky

  that drips with honey and milk.

  * * *

  Your Happiness

  Your happiness, my friend, is not

  out there;

  not in anyone’s hand.

  It is in the depth of the music that comes

  looking for you

  even when you’ve stopped listening.

  Ego looks outside and sees mistakes everywhere

  and blames you for everything that has gone wrong.

  Love moves through every single breath you take

  and drops all the charges against you.

  * * *

  Labor within Labor

  you are here now.

  that is the beauty we love to sing.

  Look at a mountain. Beneath her solid mask,

  there lies a profound tenderness we cannot reach with thought.

  Your eyes are fresh and your lips are full of sweetness

  and sublime words surge through your veins.

  In the middle of the night

  You hear a cow going into a deep labor.

  You drop everything

  and help with the delivery

  The calf falters a little bit, until her legs could find the ground.

  She opens her eyes, then parts her mouth and would say:

  I am a language woven from the sighs of labor within labor.

  I am the scent of love the lovers desire to smell.

  Thought arises and says:

  I have an accent. Can everyone understand me?

  The heart replies:

  You speak God’s accent.

  If they cannot understand you,

  No worries. You can understand them.

  Love knows neither doubt nor expectation.

  * * *

  Sweet Bewilderment

  You are the sweet bewilderment,

  sealed in an envelope and

  delivered to every door by a letter carrier.

  A friend brings you into a guestroom,

  rips you open with a shimmering knife

  and spills your essence.

  Oh child of the bright sun!

  Whoever has tasted the wonders of this spilling

  would not wish to go back to a box again.

  * * *

  Face of Stillness

  You can sit cross-legged,

  keep the spine straight and meditate.

  You can perform ablutions several times a day,

  open the books and recite the prayers or chant or

  count the rosary or go on fasting for months.

  But if the heart is not cracked open,

  if the bird in the cage is not allowed to fly free

  If the mind is not empty,

  How can you feel the sun rising in your chest?

  How can you touch the face of stillness?

  * * *

  Overwatering Your Cabbage

  By worrying too much,

  by thinking too much,

  you are overwatering your cabbage.

  Stop and look at the vast space around you

  and the space inside you.

  Life enjoys the simplicity

  of going for a walk, “chopping wood

  and carrying water”*,

  doing the dishes

  and cooking dinner.

  Here you are simply

  being fully present,

  making love to the beloved.

  *From a Zen saying: “Before enlightenment chop wood and carry water, after enlightenment chop wood and carry water.”

  * * *

  This Boring Room

  I left this boring room where

  they constantly talk about linguistic sciences,

  phrase structures and punctuations.

  Out in the wilderness horses make love with every single atom

  and dancing freely to their farts.

  The subject and the object, the doer and

  The act of doing have evaporated into the glow of the golden sun

  and the baby is connected to the mother

  with no punctuation marks.

  * * *

  What Has the Tree Lost

  what has the tree lost

  In shedding her old bark?

  It is called wild-eyed courage.
<
br />   It is called freshness in the seeing.

  It is called clarity in the waterfall

  where the heart, the bridge to the heart

  and the song in the heart are one.

  The tree knows

  losing something is a trip

  to a place where life has heard her first song.

  So why are we afraid of losing?

  * * *

  Gemstone

  A true friend does not just send money, flowers or

  a bottle of wine or gemstone.

  A true friend awakens the flowers already inside of you,

  A true friend directs you to this omnipresent,

  fathomless, unimaginably delicious fragrance

  in your heart.

  * * *

  Waiting for the Rooster

  Every day

  A lotus emerges from between poems,

  out of sheer serenity as the reminder

  of the one we don’t have a name for.

  Don’t talk about the heart any more

  Be the heart.

  Open your eyes and see your elegance.

  And no more waiting for the rooster

  To wake you up in the mornings.

  Be the rooster, my friend, and fall in love.

  * * *

  Ripples

  Like

  Pebbles

  We throw

  In the ocean,

  Words we utter

  Or whisper

  Can make ripples

  And waves.

  * * *

  You Are the Change

  You are not here to get used to change;

  You are the change itself.