Hafez means the preserver of the very Word of God;
For him, this was not the Koran, but truth’s very bod.
His vocation was the ghazal- a personal confession:
The Beloved’s long curly hair was his constant obsession.
For God to be bloody real, he has to be flesh and blood;
All other definitions can not ever be understood.
The religious prefer to flirt with a bloodless abstraction:
What the Lord said, gives the dogmatic enormous traction.
The passionate lover longs for genuine intimacy;
To undress a hidebound book is cerebral lunacy!
Hafez’s other name means Revealer of the Hidden;
For the preacher, the twists of love’s curls are forbidden.
Darvish wonders what in the history of sacred speech,
Can compare with what the Divan-e-Hafez has to teach?
