For me the province of poetry is a private ecstasy made public, and the social role of the poet is to display moments of shared universal epiphanies capable of healing our sense of mortal estrangement—from ourselves, from each other, from our source, from our destiny, from The Divine.
(Note: This poem posted after a longish hiatus in postings, due to travel to California to see daughter and husband and their daughter, and read at the 2013 Sufi Symposium, and to Switzerland to see son and wife and their two children, where we visited The Blind Cow (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUxsaM-c1fk), where you eat in pitch darkness and are served by blind waitpersons. Amazing. This poem was written during cancer treatment this past summer, when from the outset I’d wanted to “talk to my body,” even sing to it with a little rattle, to rid the tumor peacefully, while radiation and chemo hit it with its salvos. All’s well, alhamdulillah, and so far so good.
TALK
Talk to your body
talk to your soul
Talk to the thunder on the hill
Talk to God’s world in
which we dwell
the day in tumult
the night that’s still
Talk to creatures that
cross your path
lambs of peace
Tygers of wrath
The door that’s shut
the door that’s open
If we talk to God’s world
we talk to God
Who’s the only One Who
makes things happen
They say one went mad
talking to roses
but in their beauty
saw God’s responses
The sunset pouring its
gold in the sky
filled his heart
as it filled his eye
and as he talked to the
air around him
The Friend found him
___________________
7/13/12 (from Down at the Deep End, The Ecstatic Exchange, 2012)
This narrative poem was written in hospital during a chemo session, contemplating God’s sending a perceived “calamity” that might be, in fact, heading off a worse one. Gratitude for every state we find ourselves in, in every condition, is the most open-hearted basis of our being, and seeing the possibility that, not “things could be worse” exactly, but that what He’s sent to us in the way of a difficulty could be forestalling or outright subverting something far graver. This poem is the story metaphor of that contemplation…
1
The circus let out early and the
elephant sat in her cage
Clowns removed their white to their natural
pink or brown underneath
The contortionist stretched out for a
lengthy nap
along his entire length
as normal as anyone supine
Josie the tightrope walker walked between the
caravans puffing on her forbidden
cigarette in the slight haze of this
tropical afternoon
The giraffe’s heads towered above the
caravan roofs and the
village children from afar delighted in their
phantasmal shapes
All is well on the circus grounds
and nothing is afoot
No skullduggery or malfeasance no
shady dealings or larcenous absconding
but only a usual afternoon among these
unusual folk for whom a
nice afternoon off though somewhat
rare is a welcome and
calming respite to an otherwise
irregular and certainly offbeat if not
downright
bohemian life
2
When the fire broke out
the lion was asleep
What no one knew was that an
entire angelic order had been
assigned to watch over the circus
because of the child born to the Argentinean
trapeze artists who at
the time were picnicking with their
five children at the
edge of the grounds
the saintly baby in a
basket surrounded by birds
A loud crack as the main
tent pole split in two
a great roaring bellow as the canvas
in the main tent caught fire
smoke billowed above the
circus as if phantom hippopotamus
herds were riding down the sky
though on each billow an
angel rode to keep the
flames from harming a single soul
as everyone awoke or ran in their
panic to the water buckets
always at the ready for such
emergencies
Cries and shouts of the
circus performers and crew
pulling animal wagons away
calling to each other through
chugging billows of
brown smoke
3
The flames resembled leaping lions
jabbing snakes
relentless in their attacks and hot
counterattacks
a vicious darkness where there’d
been ebullient light and
tuba oompahs and flight through hoops
but while Hell seems to have
opened up at this happy circus
what’s fascinating is the
angelic squadrons fanning
out in the unseen to save each soul
suddenly making real the
feats of daring and aerial acrobatics
that outlined by flames now become so
earthbound
Billions of angels came in phalanges and filed in
troops between the fire and all the
people and beasts
They tumbled through belches of smoke
and flew in the rafters’ heights as well as
at the low level of wagon wheels and
floppy clowns
combating sheets of fire with their
angelic ice
lessening its outraged effects
against the innocent joys of
brightly painted matter
suddenly vulnerable to the
disease of burning
for that one precious baby destined to
shine in the eternal worlds as
saint and messenger among us
same as that spot of perfection in our
bodies unscorched by any
outbreak and surrounded by
angelic air invulnerable to its
flames
That sea of light in the
clenched ball of darkness that is
our mortal being
doomed to incinerate in its
brightness
that flying baby in the
wild circus of our being
angelically protected
that leads us into God’s
cool asbestos atmospheres beyond all
conflagration
the leaping sweet roar of it made more
agile than even death’s
deep earthly plodding
4
Josie sat on a coil of
uncharred rope and unburnt pulleys
and noticed how frayed the
rope was in places and how
close it was to breaking
The clowns went through the
unharmed remains of their
dressing room tents and noticed
the old tins of clown white’s ingredients
included traces of poisonous lead
The saved heap of nets the flames missed
showed signs of rot
The trapeze artists with the saintly
child saw their old but unscorched rigging
had been about to shred
as they coughed their way to where they
lay in ropey zigzags across the dirt
But the old main tent was flakes of
ashen canvas
The wooden center rings were black dust
The lion lay asleep on his huge paws
The elephant gazed through slow wise
eyes at his fifth disaster since
Madras
as the circus performers thanked their
God that what He threatened them with
saved them from worse calamities
and another day dawned and the
circus put itself back together
and moved on
______________________________________________
6/10-11/12 (from Down at the Deep End)
I’m averse to drawing attention to physical ailments, but since a bit before writing God of the Sliver I‘ve been undergoing radiation and chemotherapy treatment for base-of-tongue cancer, and poems have come in their fashion by Allah in the way my last year’s Ramadan is Burnished Sunlight poems came, that I posted here almost daily as they came. I’ve been debating whether to do the same with these poems during treatment, with some days naturally skipped, as standing with my Ecstatic Exchange “mission statement” (above below the blog title), and the truthfulness and usefulness of what comes through poetry in ease times and times of crisis. Our physical frailties and hopes and rope-holding to Allah’s Mercy in every situation being true for all of us, and with that in mind perhaps some of these poems may resonate, insha’Allah. So with your indulgence, the first two poems below in reverse order are the first, with Good Cheer Among the Cynics now placed as the third in its proper order as received.
I appreciate and thank you for your readership and your prayers. As the Prophet Muhammad said, peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, “Take benefit of five before five: your youth before your old age, your health before your sickness, your wealth before your poverty, your free-time before your preoccupation, and your life before your death.”
Faced with a dire illness, I find a certain urgency in expression. But insha’Allah, I fully intend and pray to “foreclose” on these inside cellular interlopers, and live to tell the tale as their own tails recede and vanish quite away, all if Allah so deems. We come from Him, are His alone, and to Him we return.
Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore
__________________________
3 / GOOD CHEER AMONG THE CYNICS
Good Cheer came and
sat among the cynics
“What evidence do you have?” they asked
putting on snarl cougar masks and
long piggy moose faces
“None that you can see” sang Good Cheer “though it land on you like a piano”
They sat still as a piano landed on them
proof of their position
even though it was playing a
gorgeous new sonata
“That darkness we see
lays on us like gabardine” they chanted
gleefully
“The darkness you see is only
a play of light” sang back Glee
There’s no end to this drama and the
back and forth between them
and the cynics have convincing
evidence on their side it’s true
but when the dust clears
do you see ruins or new shapes
and can anything God brings be
imperfect?
Even though the angels who bring things
look like they’ve been stung by wasps and
beaten up by psychopaths?
Conceive of a world
through this one
better than this one
Live in it
Stretch out your hand
and decorate it with
fairy lights
for all our own and
your own
wellbeing
___________________
5/11 (from Down at the Deep End, in progress, insha’Allah)
The magnitude is impossible to deduce
from this side of the sky
From the other side of the sky
everything’s possible
A man with a deer’s head teaching mathematics to
a classroom of students who ring like bells
A plateau of goats on their hindlegs doing somersaults
as their shepherdess reads to them from tablets of silk
Astronomers who simply point to somewhere in the sky
and stars and planets call out their names
in audible voices as clear as trumpets
A land of waterfalls so plentifully lustrous
everyone’s flotation devices are biologically supplied
A central globed arena rotating in ten different speeds of peacefulness
without seeming to move at all or ever come to anything like a stop
Migrating birds seen in one direction in profile
making the shape of our ecstatic faces sailing through blue sky
The staggeringly bright radiance that
floods God’s universe
in dark shadow compared to the
workshop He works from
which is everywhere at once
and every time and every place
simultaneously present in the spark
suspended in air
which is this world we perceive and
grieve over so seriously
barely a blink of light
as it falls into our hands
leaving a star-shaped scar
that heals before it wounds
because the magnitude of all this is nearly
impossible to deduce
from anything anyone does or says
except the light in our eyes
and what our hearts recite
so precisely and gloriously
in the immeasurable magnitude
of a single heartbeat
_______________________________
1/2/2010 (from The Throne Perpendicular to All that is Horizontal, unpublished)
