The Barest Handhold
I don’t even know what I know much less what I don’t know A Chinese laundry full of coats and shirts knows more than…
These poems are begun by an inspired first line or two, and during this particular development from poem to poem you might find ones of cheerful and imaginative transcendence or darkening recognitions of a more perhaps serious actuality (mortality, health, its shadow, its return to wholeness, etc.). I know that my intention to see cancer as a spiritual experience (hopefully everything that comes to us, heavy or light), without wallowing in, say, self-pity (surrender to Allah, the Merciful, Living, Sustaining, the Light, is really the only course, this rocky climb of purification) keeps me in a basic cheerful state (not always, last weekend after the second chemo, was hard, and Allah knows what’s to come, known to often be somewhat dire), so these poems are ones of need, throwing the heart line out to attach to God’s harbor, even if in a sizzle of pain and deep down general dolor…
It may be a kind of course in poetics also, what is appropriate to sing of, as poet, as Muslim/Sufi (insha’Allah)… as well as a Pilgrim’s Progress through the interweave of body/spirit, flesh/soul, dunya/achira, that is each of our mortal lot.
VENETIAN MAGICIANS
Venetian magicians in their
satin pantaloons conjuring
flames out of ferns and fountains out of
pots
against a backdrop of Vesuvius
Rolling roils of ocean boiling
over us in rare rags of surf bubbles
until we swirl with dolphins and
speak their squeaks and trills
The earth itself opening up and
swallowing us whole
Ah this life with its flags always at
half mast and wild winds
blowing them to tatters
and the cups in our hands with their
soothing liquids and the
windows we look out of and the
windows we look in
Is it between our in and out breaths that
Paradise inflates and all
darkness expires?
At the moment of
each eyeblink when
our lids are closed that
a near vision of the Next World’s
garden drapes its vines and
opens its opulent avenues?
The Venetian magicians take a bow
and the curtains close
The roiling ocean pokes its waves in the
air and flattens them at our
feet as we walk earth’s lateral beaches
looking for gold
God’s given us a door that we
only need open when the
need arises which is
always
And the road abruptly ends
which is now
5/19/12
Oh Allah
Let me have no fear
but only love for You
with every blow
5/19/12 (from Down at the Deep End)
Categories: Poems