Ramadan’s Flame Hoops

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