Short Fable of the Three Schooners
The first sailboat out had nowhere to go but forward out into pure outness The light slitted down in louvered doors that swung…
OK let’s get this straight —
Who wants to fast really?
Put the body through drought’s
grinding chains?
Not reach for the plum or the chocolate
bonbon?
When we see a Chinese contortionist and
think how can she put her head onto
her feet like that without her spine
snapping and that we might also think
and why?
Or a lion capable of
snapping the head off the spangled
guy with the whip
but instead roars and
leaps through a fiery hoop?
How close did the
spangled guy have to get to having his
head bitten off before
perfecting that smooth
sleek slow motion leap through flames to the
pit orchestra’s brassy flourish?
It’s a hard life we make even
harder by submitting to not eating for
nearly sixteen hours of normal
daylight?
But such a curious
turnabout happens when it’s in a
dimension obligatory to Allah that truly
boggles the reluctant mind
in that a kind of garden does
open its pearl-handled gate in a
space that suddenly
imposes itself all during that
time and our
mortality actually always
hanging by a thread becomes
really quite incandescent!
I mean
crowded with
angels
known or unbeknownst to us
It so often
seems so
Our reluctant lion roars and we
put our heads on our feet
somehow passing through
Ramadan’s flame hoops
with ease
8/12/11 (12 Ramadan) (from Ramadan is Burnished Sunlight)
Categories: Poems, Ramadan / 'Eid, Fasting