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Poem in the First Person
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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
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3/14/2012 (from The Match That Becomes a Conflagration, unpublished)
Categories: Poems, The Prophet Muhammad (salallahu alayhi wa sallam), Death, Love