With the Saint at the Window / A wali’s passing
In 2014, a great wali (saint) of the Moroccan desert died, at a very advanced age, …
Suppose we start with what’s right in
front of us
Piles of books and a blue thermos full of
water
How can we reach from this to a
medieval ship on the high seas full of
levitating saints whose vestments
flap like clouds
or salt flats from the wastes of
Africa where the sea once stood
on all fours like a lowing animal
but sank into the sand at last
leaving only its crystally salt skin behind?
Or how to reach from this place to
a simultaneous multiplicity of places
each with its particular
flag and its own coral lagoon
with soft music wafting through swaying
palm trees?
How do we get from where we
are to where we aren’t?
From our circumscribed mortal being to
full flight before God’s endlessly
Beneficent Face beyond all clouds and
hills all conflagrations and sweet
resolutions of both conflict and
harmony where only choirs inside
grassblades clods and eyelashes can be
heard ascending scales of
jubilant praise?
Our mortality can’t define us
but our divine contract can
whose heartbeats constantly sign on the
dotted line before His Majesty
at the beginning not only of our own
short lives but also at the beginning point of the
earliest millennia of shade and
light across earth’s billowing waters
where levitating saints whose vestments
flap like clouds float now on waves of
silvery radiant song
2/27/2008 (from The Fire Eater’s Lunchbreak)
Categories: Poems