You alone, my Beloved, are protection,
support, inner force, and true being.
Always courting my soul, always in sympathy,
you are my rapture, well-being and joy,
the thrill of my existence, the consecration of my life.
I kneel in your presence, heart in prostration,
enraptured and exalted by your essence.
The straps of your sandals I kiss with delight.
I cannot find words to describe my mystical spouse,
the favorite of the universe, the hidden pearl.
O thief of God-filled hearts,
I submit to your overwhelming embrace,
annihilated by this magnificent Love.
Without home or asylum, without path or trace,
without any escape, any remedy,
I am lost in the desert, mountainous and remote,
the flowering desert of your Love.
You are closer than my central artery.
For you I have been mortally wounded by sweet arrows
in the mystical assembly of the heroic lovers of Love.
It is the radiant death of mortality.
I am amazed by this depth of Love,
which removes reason from the enamored ones.
I am an ant on a small leaf of the immense tree of Love,
a mote of pollen in the endless abyss of Love.
My naked heart is a brilliant ember
before the royal blue throne
of the ardent saints of my lineage.
Always ascending, this infinite aspiration
that no flood can extinguish
confirms the mystery of Assumption.
I am the virgin bride of Divine Wisdom.
An excerpt from Countenance and Heart of the Shaykh, an epic poem in Atom, by Shaykh Nur al-Jerrahi, may his soul be sanctified