Why "Tired of Speaking Sweetly" Feels Like My Spiritual Autobiography These Days

With all the physical pain that I've endured the past six months due to an injury and subsequent chronic suffering, and the emotional and spiritual tumult that invariably ensues from pain, I found this poem--in its brutal vision of God--oddly sanguine, strangely familiar. What seems remarkable to me about the poem, from a contemporary eye, is how this rather old poem feels both politically incorrect and yet how powerfully modern. God as drunk spouse who likes to rough us up?!

TIRED OF SPEAKING SWEETLY by Hafiz

Love wants to reach out and manhandle us,
Break all our teacup talk of God.

If you had the courage and
Could give the Beloved His choice, some nights,
He would just drag you around the room
By your hair,
Ripping from your grip all those toys in the world
That bring you no joy.

Love sometimes gets tired of speaking sweetly
And wants to rip to shreds
All your erroneous notions of truth

That make you fight within yourself, dear one,
And with others,

Causing the world to weep
On too many fine days.

God wants to manhandle us,
Lock us inside of a tiny room with Himself
And practice His dropkick.

The Beloved sometimes wants
To do us a great favor:

Hold us upside down
And shake all the nonsense out.

But when we hear
He is in such a “playful drunken mood”
Most everyone I know
Quickly packs their bags and hightails it
Out of town.

~ Hafiz ~


(The Gift – versions of Hafiz by Daniel Ladinsky)