Galib : Love is a lamp of God

For more about the 18th c. CE Sufi and highly respected Ottoman poet Seyh Galib, see this earlier post.

Love is a lamp of God, I am its moth;
love is a shackle, my heart is its crazy captive.

Since becoming a sharer in the secret of your glance
my heart became a friend of the friend, a stranger to the stranger.

Making no difference between dry piety and endless carouse —
such is the libertine way of the masters of ecstasy.

The black soil of the reveler’s world is full of abundance,
the sun of wisdom rises in the tavern jar.

He drinks the wine mingled with poison of the glance of those eyes;
I could be tipsy from the languor of those blue eyes.

Take care, do not neglect that sleeping dagger,
its tale is always the gossip of death.

Galib, enter the secluded palace of pleasure and see its secret,
the wise way of the daughter of the vine is something else.

Translation Bernard Lewis

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