! In The Spirit Of Rumi - 29 Poem by Michael Shepherd

O Caliphs of the world
who have executed so many saints
for daring to say that ‘I am God within myself’ –

If you yourselves are not God within yourselves,
then who are you to pronounce punishment
upon any other man?

And now, every man who carries
a sword, a dagger, bomb or gun
would think himself a Caliph,
messenger of the Lord…

how wrong they are.

Yet Allah, the great, the merciful beyond our understanding,
allows them to live on after their victims’ death - gives
a little time to know themselves
as the wheel of the potter, Destiny, turns for them,
before they return to Him
as clay to be reshaped in the Potter’s hands
or dry and crumble into dust.