Why do you stay in prison, when the door is so wide open?

We traced the familiar English wording — "Why do you stay in prison, when the door is so wide open?" — to Coleman Barks's rendering of the Rumi poem "A Community of the Spirit," and a live check of the published record confirms the line appearing in that form with the surrounding text ("Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking. Live in silence.") credited to Rumi in several scholarly and trade books, including *Spirituality, Action, & Pedagogy* (2004) and *The Palgrave Handbook of Incarceration in Popular Culture* (2020). What we could not do is match this exact aphoristic line to a specific numbered ghazal, rubai, or passage in the *Masnavi* or *Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi* in the literal scholarly translations of Nicholson, Arberry, or Mojaddedi, and that gap matters because Barks worked from earlier translations rather than the Persian and freely reshaped the poetry into modern English. So the English sentence people quote is best understood as Barks's interpretive rendering of a poem presented as Rumi's, not a verbatim primary-source line from Rumi himself. We found no credible competing author and no documented instance of the line predating Rumi — the suggestion that it merely resembles later self-help "open door" imagery is a thematic impression, not a citable alternative origin, so nothing supports calling it misattributed. On balance, this is a genuine Rumi poem circulating through a modern interpretive translation, widely and consistently credited to Rumi but not confirmable to a primary Persian source in this exact wording. We classify this quote as attributed.