When We Need Something Bigger Like Prayer

Zero Circle

Be helpless, dumbfounded,

Unable to say yes or no.

Then a stretcher will come from grace

to gather us up.

We are too dull-eyed to see that beauty.

If we say we can, we’re lying.

If we say No, we don’t see it,

That No will behead us

And shut tight our window onto spirit.

So let us rather not be sure of anything,

Beside ourselves, and only that, so

Miraculous beings come running to help.

Crazed, lying in a zero circle, mute,

We shall be saying finally,

With tremendous eloquence, Lead us.

When we have totally surrendered to that beauty,

We shall be a mighty kindness.

Rumi, Version by Coleman Barks

Rumi is popularly known as Mevlānā in Turkey, Mawlānā in Iran and Afghanistan,
and simply Rumi to the English-speaking world.  
Rumi (September 1207 –  December 1273) was a 13th-century Persian-Muslim-poet-teacher-jurist-theologian-Sufi-mystic.