Poems from the Divan of Hafiz

These are poems written in blood and wine, by a poet who called the wine-seller God and the beloved's face a scripture. Hafiz lived in 14th century Persia, and his verses nearly got him killed more than once for their scandalous refusal to separate earthly desire from divine longing. In his hands, a cup of wine becomes communion; a lover's gaze becomes union with the infinite. Gertrude Bell's translation captures the luminous clarity of his Persian, the way his lines move like music and strike like lightning. These are not gentle poems. They celebrate the body's joy and grieve its mortality with the same ferocious breath. They mock priests who pray without feeling. They invite you to drink deeply from a cup that never empties. Five centuries before Rumi, Hafiz mastered the secret: that the language of human love is the only vocabulary large enough to speak of God.