The Masnavi by Rumi (1273)

Listen to the reed, Rumi begins, and the whole poem follows from that command: a length of cane, carved from the marsh and hollowed out, wails because it remembers the bed it was torn from. That cry is you. _The Masnavi_ understands the human ache as homesickness for God, the soul severed from its origin and singing all its life to get back. Across six books and some twenty-five thousand couplets, dictated aloud as Rumi walked, turned, and wept, his student Husam al-Din racing to catch each line, the poem never explains its mysticism; it enacts it. A tale of a king and a slave-girl breaks off into a tale of a grocer and a parrot, which dissolves into pure prayer, then doubles back, because a soul reaching for the divine never moves in a straight line. There is no last word that resolves it, only the reed still sounding, and a longing that, the deeper it goes unanswered, somehow draws you nearer to its source.