Monthly Archives: May 2011

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Poem: So Little Effort

There once was a man who tipped his hat
and out fell bird’s eggs

How they got there was nobody’s guess
but God’s to know

Once a man stepped out of them and trees
grew from his shoes

The shoes are gone but the roots are
long and the tree shades his house

How can we attribute anything to anything at all
and not to God?

No conception contains Him but really
every squeal and tweedle audible or

inaudible is something rare and
strange with kaleidoscope colorations and

a falling together of the most splendid elements
from racing gray hounds to a sudden

standstill in the middle of a field of an
entire herd of sheep

until they go back to their munching

A woman got up one morning and
never stopped climbing

They say she’s at the ninety-ninth level about now
watering the universe with her

tears her good will and a little silver
watering can that never runs dry

I sometimes wonder what we’re waiting for
then go back to whatever it was I was

doing

On the one hand waiting
and on the other the great rush toward and

through us of everything we’re decreed to see

It’s not so mysterious nor even in one sense
theological

It simply is

The forest opens up like the halves of a melon
and all its billion leaves are shining

Our little trails on the ground one time
covered with tiny gold leaf-shaped

diary pages of the tree’s former hot season

now scattered at their roots like
school girls having left their homework to

run off to play

There once was a man and a woman
who saw each other through a

lattice work of purity and when their
marriage was ordained a drop from

heaven landed on the canvas slope of a white tent
and ran down it to water what grew to

remind us all of the incessant
incandescent bounty we

obtain with so little effort
___________________________
10/7/10 (from The Caged Bear Spies the Angel, soon to appear)

by

DEATH OF BIN LADIN

We live in a world of symbols. Here was an evil mastermind of terror and mischief, brother to the great inhuman monsters, Hitler, Stalin, Saddam, whose face has graced many a T-shirt, for some as enemy, for others as hero.

But Allah early in the Qur’an, in the 7th verse of the second Surah, The Cow, right after proclaiming His Book for the believers, says: “Among the people there are some who say, ‘We have faith in Allah and the Last Day,’ when they are not believers. They think they deceive Allah and those who have faith. They deceive no one but themselves, but they are not aware of it. There is a sickness in their hearts and Allah has increased their sickness. They will have a painful punishment on account of their denial. When they are told, ‘Do not cause corruption on the earth,’ they say, ‘We are only putting things right.’ No indeed! They are the corrupters, but they are not aware of it.”

When the revelation of the Truth comes, God knows that some will use it for evil ends, turning even against their own so-called co-religionists, as Bin Laden has done to even a greater extent than he did against Americans. A great and sober lament should go out to all his victims over the decades, and wonder that the heart of someone could so turn to darkness, after beginning in Light (he was known as a pious student), and a prayer that all tyrannical killers might have their hearts softened if not frightened to death by the advent of his eradication from the human transaction.

Symbolically, however, for all those who will persist in thinking they “have faith in Allah and the Last Day,” when they have turned it into a dimensionless ideology of self-aggrandizement against humanity, and persist in thinking that only they are “putting things right,” we can only remain vigilant, turn to solving the huge open wounds that unfortunately engender such sad maggots of the soul’s confusion: all the injustices in the Middle East and the Israelis-Palestinian issue that will, if unresolved, continue to give birth to desperation and fanaticism for some time to come.

One dead Bin Laden does not a true closure make, however victorious and symbolically powerful a finale his death makes, his clones only too ready to continue their mind-and-heart blind battles in his stead. May Allah lead us all to Light and true humility and compassion for all humankind, and His sweet Justice over all.