Category Archives: Sufi Symposium 2012

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Sufi Symposium Poem 3


LAST THINGS

1

The last rhinoceros might look around and
wonder where its beautiful beady-eyed

brothers and sisters went

The last waterfall might slide its
last cascade down the usual

rocks and feel strange

The last wheeling bird so used to
wheeling within other wheeling birds’

orbits against wandering clouds —

The last wandering cloud might wonder why
only one shadow is crossing the

earth below

Last things amounting to all the things that ever
went before

last movements shuddering into a
final stillness and a

final stillness hovering in its solitude a
moment before shivering away

We wonder whose eyes are
looking into ours for the last time

whose voice not heard up close but
neither too far away echoing faintly

whose face we gaze into before it
sets like the last sun with all its

energy drained

And then the Prophet’s light and its
prophetic treasury whose

ocean-beats billow behind all vanishing things

and the ache of a planet out in
space at a dark edge with endlessness

alone among last things

when even all creation was a cure
for God’s lordly loneliness

— and the last flickering gnat aloft in a beam of light

and the beam of light itself
lost in the Lord’s bright Eye

2

Will we take everything by the hand and
help it through the last door?

When we boarded the plane the smiling
purser asked if San Francisco was our

final destination
of course I couldn’t help myself and said

“I hope not —
God is”

And he strangely said
“I’m already there!”

Maybe he’s too busy to ask him what he
meant

rushing back and forth down the narrow
aisle bringing tea

or maybe so much flying through the air
has finally gotten him there —

We churn through the night going through
last door after last door in space

each person of us on this plane a
world abuzz with its curious proclamations

and my sense of lastness always so acute
this far off the ground

through door after door in the
darkness

Each of them God’s door
open for the first time

then vanishing away
___________________
3/14/2012
(from The Match That Begins a Conflagration, in progress)

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SUFI SYMPOSIUM POEMS 2


KNOT OF GOLD

The Prophet took people of abject poverty
and strewed rubies at their feet

There was no glass in the Prophet’s windows
for any brick to break

In each heart he ties a knot of gold
whose two ends make eternity’s

radiant reclining figure eight
gazed upon by God

We can stand in the door he made in
our being or stride through it into God’s

Presence

The Prophet never rode out on his she camel
but that they longed for his return

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Some Poems from Sufi Symposium 2012


_________________


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

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POETRY AT THE SUFI SYMPOSIUM 2012

I’ll be presenting my poetry at the Sufi Symposium this year in San Rafael, should you be nearby to attend. Check with the website listed for program times, all insha’Allah. (I’m the guy in the red scarf, at the lower right corner, at a diagonal from Coleman Barks.)