One day, sitting in a café with Rumi’s ghost
over mint tea and biscuits, he told me about Shams;
rhapsodized over his eyes, his fine voice,
his heart that opened like a flower
breathing in and out his lover’s scent;
the whole body responds to that kind of ephemeral fragrance.
On and on he went, until finally,
“Rumi, my friend, you have to stop.
This is a poem about you, not Shams.”

“Samer, my dear, we are one and the same.”