poverty of the lover

The true lover gazes toward the reality of things:

My eyes so fix

upon your image

that whatever I gaze at

I imagine you.

Wherever he looks he finds that Face and therefore needs everything he sees. 

 "Poverty is intrinsic need; it has nothing to do with this or that."

And why does nothing need the lover? One can only need something which exists.  But the lover, outwardly detached and inwardly disengaged, has returned the robe of existence and all its trappings- which he only held in trust - ... Again he has donned the patched cloak of his own nothingness.  "He is ... as he was in eternity-without-beginning," and in such a state, who needs him?

But...in poverty there comes a state wherein the poor man himself needs nothing.  As one of them said, "The poor man is not is not in need of God Himself!"  Need, after all, is an attribute of the existent; but he who dives into the sea of nothingness needs no more.  His poverty is complete.

You are nothing 
when you wed the One;
but you are everything 
when you become nothing.




~ Fakhruddin 'Iraqi
from Divine Flashes