Category Archives: Music of the Spheres

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Poem: 12 / If I Should Die Tonight


If I should die tonight
it would be like stepping out onto a big pond’s

lily pads with all the other frogs

combing out my hair and
flames falling onto a plate

the horse muzzle that follows me
finally coming so close I can

feel its breath
sweet as clover all over me and the

sheer delight of simply galloping

Hills become flat and
broad valleys rolling

Sky melts back into its
first kaleidoscope

rotating its rainbows

White gloves handle me
and swans crowd the air with an

avalanche of feathers rising on its
updrafts

I’d say goodbye to everything at once
and hello to God Who would

come through the aether to catch me
afloat as always but now with even

greater buoyancy

Let giraffes crowd around my bed
their sexy eyelashy eyes shining as the

whole bed rises

and all the windows of the world
open of their own accord

to let me out into the sound of
tubular bells and gurgling waters and

newborns opening their eyelids for the
first time and

looking around
their inner light blending with the

light they’ve been born into
where everything happens and

nothing happens
in the instant of our lives and deaths

but this
sudden awakening
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5/25/12 (from Down at the Deep End, progressing)

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Poem: 5 / Seeing the Scaffold


Seeing the scaffold at the end of the road
or a steamroller coming toward you

or a herd of elephants bearing down
or looking into the maw of a tiger

on your morning stroll

his teeth and back of throat
and his greater existence

about to surround you
and all around you palm trees

sway and water still
rushes to its destination and

birds fly into branches and
continue to sing in fact

the whole universe is now a
polyphonic birdsong some trilling

happily some crooning mournfully
light playing its kaleidoscope patterns

around you accelerating and
brightening in gorgeous flashes

and the music of the spheres has finally
broken through the clouds

into your ears
as your

heart’s about to break
and death take you

and the procession of saints can be
glimpsed over the hill

for you to join at the end
to continue on

past this world’s din
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5/15/12 (from Down at the Deep End, in progress)

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Some Poems from Sufi Symposium 2012


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YOU’LL SING A SONG

You’ll sing a song from somewhere out of your depths
and light will hit it and it’ll be
a diamond brooch worn at the back of
Layla’s head in a sunny glade

it’ll be a drop of water hanging at the
tip of a leaf in a dark rainforest radiating diamond light

a deep chasm with a train trestle above it and an
old fashioned train chugging along
oblivious to all danger over a giant arc filled with blue smoke

when you open your heart to sing
the whole room becomes a single ear

or even no ear at all but more like a
sharp point say of a needle about to
enter a cloth to sew
a saintly sleeve to the main body of the divine garment

the exact tip of the needle the sound-receiver
for the entire universe made drunk in the
sudden echoing orbit of your song