The Masnavi

Six books, twenty-five thousand couplets, dictated over the last fifteen years of his life — parables that interrupt themselves, jokes that turn serious, arguments abandoned mid-line for a better image. It opens with a cut reed complaining, and the complaint is the doctrine.

The reed is this door's sound. A hollow cane taken from the reed-bed and made to sing about being taken from the reed-bed: separation, and the ache that is itself the evidence of where you came from. The Hebrew for the turn homeward is teshuvah.