Only Breath
Only Breath - meaning Summary
Beyond All Fixed Identities
The speaker rejects religious labels, cultural identities, physical origins, and even the ordinary distinction between body and soul. In their place, the poem presents a mystical identity grounded in union with the Beloved, a Sufi name for the divine. The apparent opposites of this world and the next, inner and outer, first and last, are understood as aspects of one reality sustained by a single sacred breath.
Read Complete AnalysesNot Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu Buddhist, sufi, or zen. Not any religion or cultural system. I am not from the East or the West, not out of the ocean or up from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not composed of elements at all. I do not exist, am not an entity in this world or in the next, did not descend from Adam and Eve or any origin story. My place is placeless, a trace of the traceless. Neither body or soul. I belong to the beloved, have seen the two worlds as one and that one call to and know, first, last, outer, inner, only that breath breathing human being.
Feel free to be first to leave comment.