Like When You Wave at a Train and the Train Hoots Back at You $15

This may be my most personal book, as I wrote this collection of poems as an attempt to definitively and honestly connect in a deep way with Farid, my teenage stepson. The dynamic of our relationship, from the time of our entrance into each other’s lives after I married his mother in 1980, when he was a little over two years old, was basically sound. But perhaps as with all teenage boys and their dads, step or no, by the time he was thirteen we were somewhat, though never disastrously, at odds. As a writer of poems rather than a swinger of baseball bats, a caster of fly fishing rods, a shooter of pheasant rifles, and as someone who had sat at the feet of various saintly shuyukh, or Sufi Masters, in particular the great scholar and Qutub Shaykh Muhammad ibn al Habib of Fez, buried now in his Zawiyya in Meknes, I thought I might try to instill some wisdom into the proceedings as the seal of our spiritual bond.

“Ah, since you’re not my
natural son, you can be my
supernatural son! No actual genes of mine

swim in your blood, your flesh doesn’t
resemble mine, though since I’ve been your
dad from the time you were two, we now have a
definite

family resemblance, leaping over
genetic fact like some sleek green grasshopper of
supernatural light.”

Poem Selection from Like When You Wave at a Train and the Train Hoots Back at You