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
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
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.
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.