I have wanted to be more.
To be the rain in your desert.
To keep my car cleaner.
To grow wings. And every door
I opened, I imagined I could open
it wider. I have wanted to be
not just the sunrise, but a better
sunrise. Not just a woman,
but a better woman. Not just
a song but the whole symphony.
To open the door has not been enough.
I have wanted to take the door off
its hinges, to take down the walls, too.
See what a reaching mind can do?
It will tear down the whole house
just to let in a breeze. I have wanted
to be any flower even slightly
more in bloom than my own petaled want.
To be vast. To be vaster than that.
To be true. “Oh friend,” says Rumi,
from behind the sunrise,
“you are not yet too old,
it is not yet too late for you
to swim in your own sea,
to emerge from the depths
of yourself and refuse to find refuge
outside your own heart.”
I try to impress him, to show him
I’m listening by leaning toward him so hard
I fall down on my ear. “My dear,”
he says, with a tender laugh,
“you look so sweet as you stretch
toward my voice as a sunflower
bends toward the sun.” And I
raise myself up from the floor
to ask him, please, to tell me more,
but already he is gone.
I do think the wants of the first half of the poem flow rather well toward Rumi, the last part of the poem. But I also think your wants would have more immediacy without all those helpers tied to the past tense, like “have wanted.”
I think I see with Rumi’s comment that “you are not yet too old” why you want to make the past more of the focus in the first part of the poem. Still, as you talk with Rumi you still haven’t achieved those dreams, so the present tense works, I think. If nothing, it picks up the pace of the first half of the poem. Just try a reading with present tense,
“I want to be more.
To be the rain in your desert.
To keep my car cleaner.
To grow wings. And every door
I open, I imagine I can open
it wider. I want to be…
I like the poem, though. Especially the stretching like a sunflower ending.