Willingly I would approach Love, If I could reach

Willingly I would approach Love,
If I could reach it from inside.
But no one could sing it with me,
who much joins creatures.

Naked love which spares nothing
in its savage demise,
Separated from every accident
finds its essential purity.

In the pure abandon of love,
no created good subsists:
love deprives of every form
those which it welcomes in its simplicity.

Free from every mode,
irrelevant to each image:
such life are leading down here
the poor in spirit

Exiling,
begging one’s bread and the rest is not all:
the poor in spirit must be without ideas
in the vast simplicity.

which has no beginning,
no form, no mode, no reason, no sense,
no opinion, no thought, no intention, no science:
which is without orb and without limit.

Indeed, in this desert and savage simplicity
live in unity the poor in spirit:
there, they find nothing, except the free silence
which always answers to Eternity.

This is said in a short poem,
but the path is long, I know it well,
and much suffer endures
who wants to go all over it.

(Hadewijch, XXVI, translated by Immanuel Sherman for M. MD)