Time for anti-war poems…

A THOUSAND ARMIES

And the hapless Soldier’s sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls
— William Blake

A thousand armies sat on a wall and
everyone of them was dead

eating sandwiches out of little tin boxes
yellow broken teeth and considerable chewing

But their eyes were not that interested in seeing
their eyes didn’t follow anything moving in front of them
or look as they pulled the waxed paper away from their bread
or broke open their bottles of water or sat with their friends

There was a constant murmuring like a stomach churning its juices
a constant scratching like animals caught between walls

They sat on a wall overlooking an orchard and
each one of them was dead

But they watched the seasons come to life on the
vine in the vineyards and down the long
crop rows though their eyes barely took it in
and when the crops were harvested and the
snows came they barely blinked they barely noticed

Thousands of armies dangling their legs bootless in heaven
eating sandwiches out of little silver boxes
their eyes transformed from burning buildings and people
running into the streets to
green fields full of lions and lambs and other wingéd animals
lying together

though their eyes were always elsewhere

and their hearts were as round as the world

3/23/2003 (from Psalms for the Brokenhearted)

Still thinking about Imran…

ONE DAY DEATH KNOCKED

One day death knocked and knocked and no one answered –
Only the door’s wood-grain in resounding unison answered

A water drop on the lip of a glass was held suspended –
Only shadows cast by trees like oars on a galleon answered

We were all safely dead to death – we were all satisfied –
Not even the xylophone bones of one skeleton answered

Death was stymied – death turned livid – not used to this treatment –
We’d reached a state of eternal life – as if only a jaunty disembodied accordion answered

But it may have only lasted an eternal nanosecond –
Because finally – after a non-temporal millennium or two – someone answered

The door swung open – now we were face to face with death again –
And all of us who by then had been by life undone – answered

But it was a different answer – it was a smile of sweet recognition alone –
It was an easy flow in which we – held in love’s burning sun – answered

The knock comes – in the middle of the night or morning – always uniquely –
But we can’t leave the knock – for all its intrusion – undone – unanswered

The whole universe resounds with its tapping – its light fist on our door –
But like a spy on this side of the door – death’s work must be well done – answered!

Ameen – breathing easily in your chair by the window and its clustering birds –
When death knocks may you always remember to respond to none but the One – and answer!

7/21/2002 (from The Flame of Transformation Turns to Light /99 Ghazals Written in English)
(photograph by Salihah Moore)

A Sweet-faced Saint…

AS OF A GIANT CLOUD

A sweet-faced saint like a giant cloud
floats past the cliff edge where we

stand in wait for such saintly visitation
and he doesn’t disappoint with his fond

nod in our direction and a sidelong glance that
actually lays a stripe of sunlight along the

grassy fields down below as the day rises

We’ve waited here since birth for his passing
and he has in his interior dimension all

previous saintly persons male and
female and even some of the most monumental from

the animal kingdom lions of supreme majesty and
kingfishers of spiritual acumen as well as

compassionate dogs and a white deer
standing forever by a black pool about to

drink into herself all human conflict and
mortal ambiguity

The great cloud moves slowly hair streaming and
barely separate from the atmosphere until we

see only a faint outline of his form in the
air but deep within somewhere in his

middle a rolling sea of coral-colored flame and
flashes of conch-pink light over turquoise waves

into a sunrise unfolding across the world
in everyone’s hearts at once

There is no place that does not see him
and that he doesn’t see

No flotilla nor flatland nor Fortune Five Hundred
that isn’t absorbed into his passing cloud

on his way with our faintest aspirations
toward such singular glory

5/8/2006 (from Coattails of the Saint)

_____________________________

The outpouring for Imran continues to be astonishing… he touched so many. We can only pray that his fleeting presence among us is a permanent reminder of prophetic behavior… and honor him by acting honorably.

______________________________

I’m also adding a just-completed new collage for the cover of a book of ghazals I’m publishing soon insha’Allah…entitled The Flame of Transformation Turns to Light.

Poem for Imran Saithna…

DEATH CAME IN RATHER SHEEPISHLY

In memoriam Imran Saithna

Death came in rather sheepishly having just
taken someone quite young and in the

flush of life and sat down in front of me in an
overstuffed chair and took off his shoes showing

two identical feet with actually
thousands of toes and somehow between

each toe I saw Sahara sand-dunes as
if from the air and thick Amazonian

jungle with smoke-centered clearings and
people down below with happy children running naked

and every human environment in between
and death said nothing for a while to let me

get used to his presence and on
such short notice

“It’s not what you think at all really
it’s not what anyone thinks

The wise regard it as simply another door
on a straightforward trajectory while the

stupefied are terrified as if they’d be
leaving something sumptuous for something

either blank as paint or as tedious as choir practice
when it’s actually inexpressibly engaging in a

way no one experiences on this side where you’re
sitting now listening to me babble on”

He crossed his legs and I saw at his
knees sets of wing-like flutterings

that extended backwards through the material
furniture and walls into similar but

distinctly different dimensions

And the falling apart and reconstitution of his
face sometimes like a spring day in the

woods and sometimes like a wintry chill at the
arctic top of the world but in all cases

something both familiar and strange
and then he saw me seeing and for a

moment came behind my seeing so that
I saw things here through death’s eyes for a split second

the transparency of interrelated contingencies
the way things come together in a kind of trance

the really drab colors of everything on this side
and our plucking at rainbows

and how young or old is truly only relative with
some of the youngest in years being the oldest

and vice versa and he settled back and
back into the chair through dynasty after

dynasty to Egypt and beyond and I
saw how death was an essential

ingredient to our acceleration onward
and a true disentangling but only at the time

we’re called and not at any other which
only makes entanglings greater

as in suicide or its pseudo-glamorous
perhaps slower but self-destructive variants

“The young man from the car-crash” he
said looking up at me and I saw

great golden canyons open and close in his
eyes

“He was done here and is now on a serious
diplomatic mission having left only

sweet memories behind him which for a time
makes everyone he left behind want to be

more like him
so he’s on two diplomatic missions in fact

there where he can’t be seen
and here in his echoing after-effect

where he can”

1/24 (at Fajr)

______

It’s interesting how sometimes we can be so affected by the death of someone we hardly knew. Imran contacted me by email a year or so ago about poetry, and we met only perhaps three times in all. But his death has been with me since I heard. And I’ve read what others have said, with particular sensitivity by Yoshi Misdaq on DeenPort’s messages, and have thought that, again, what people must be feeling in Iraq, where statistically every family has lost someone, and the web of relationships between people is now so touched with blood…

In Memoriam Imran Saithna

Ruba’iyat XIX

I’ll take the blows upon my chin
I’ll rise, I’ll fight and I will win
I will be happy someday soon
I will leave behind this life of sin.

Smiling as I whistle and loosely croon
Living the beat of my new found tune
Tasting the elixir of the other side
A life with only patience hewn.

Remembering all the times I cried
Ashamed of all the lies I lied
I see a new dawn rising now
The beautiful sun my final bride.

Before my fate I humbly bow
The new fields afore I dutifully plough
Sowing my seeds to reap tomorrow
Word by word I renew my vow.

(by Imran Saithna, photographs by Peter Sanders)

……

I learned this morning of the death of sweet Imran Saithna, whom I knew as a budding poet and whom I last saw reading his Ruba’iyat poems at the London Poetry Sama’ in early December of this year. He’d returned from Hajj, and emailed me, and added his impressions of the Sama’ on his blog, suitably titled Noble Intentions where you may find a poem about that event as well as more of his wonderful poems.

Whenever I hear of the death of a poet I try to read a poem of his or hers in memoriam, so this is that for Imran. Imran was very young and his work was growing, but compassion and sincere earnestness were palpable with him, and I pray he is among the highest with Allah, Who drew him near Him earlier rather than later and with (for us often a puzzling but for Him) a vast and Majestic Love. We come from Allah and to Him we return.

Comments on the passing of our brother Imran

Poem on the Prophet, peace of Allah be upon him…

THE PROPHET MUHAMMAD AROSE ONE MORNING

The Prophet Muhammad arose one morning
and by evening it was obvious he was no
ordinary mortal

He was a heart that spoke to a mouth that
spoke to the ears of multitudes

And it was our hearts that heard him
through the dust and blood of time and its
wrenchings its smooth valleys and its

sudden explosions its

disappearance and its appearance again as
faces at a window asking to be let in

to Allah’s portico facing the radiant light of the
central breath

I’m aloft in the air with these thoughts
in the thrill of a fuselage heading east

confounded by the possibility of it as we
float forward without entirely

evaporating in space as buoyant as a bubble
propelled by a superior force

He came down from the cave changed utterly
all the years of the world suddenly folded into him
literally speaking of those to come through
those who’d gone before from first to last in the
perfect order of grammatical tones and
spectacular intonations

The light of his face goes before this
airplane in the dark

The light of his star goes before this
planet as its anchoring beam

The light of his heart in our hearts is what
makes us sane

4/29/2005
(en route to the Grand Mawlid at Wembley, London,
from Coattails of the Saint)

Spring Poem in Winter

GOD’S ALCHEMY

Green elements turn into golden ones when
God’s breath flows across them

Gold dust motes float down as slowly as
elephants sinking into mud for a cooling bath

The whole golden earth turns its face to the dark
as its spine stands still and its tilt wobbles slightly

We turn our faces to the sunlight once or twice in a
day if our hearts are slow in jumping over turnstiles

I look up at the Spring trees and see some
leaves where the sun shines through turn
transparently golden

O God shine through us the way
the sun shines through these transparent leaves and

ignites them
and turns them golden

5/22/2005 (from In the Realm of Neither)

Haiku for 1/19/07 on DeenPort…

The sky is pewter…
No birds come to the feeder –
war desolates all

These haiku are inpremeditated, even unwritten until posted… spontaneity being one of the Haiku form’s essential earmarks (heart-marks?). Now winter both mentally and physically, the outside world is a bit bleak today out my window, and I can’t shake thoughts of the tragic desolating of the world at this moment that doesn’t seem to abate…

At least this sky is pewter… not ablaze with fire and smoke. At least no birds visit my feeder… not cars blasted to twisted metal and blood and bone in the street…

This haiku is an echo of the fact that, true or false, the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil makes a breeze across the globe. I love the idea of it, and know that we are all connected in ways too subtle sometimes to express, with no distance too great for this connection to bridge — Allah’s Names and Attributes at work in every instance.

Poem from: Coattails of the Saint

PATHETIC AS IT MAY SEEM

Pathetic as it may seem
this entire world sits on a table in a little

spotlight in God’s Throne Room and though actually
nearly microscopic in God’s eyes He totally

cognizant of every gnat’s move sees into our private
windows with so much compassion for our

foibles and the fact that in spite of this we
curse and stumble curse and fall curse and throw ourselves

down elephant roads where we try not to
move with the motherly herd or down the

slick side of an ugly incline foolishly subversive to
not His authority alone but to His

kindness over the little things
that we find so deafeningly paramount

and wish so persistently to clutch onto
even into and beyond death if need be

And that inside this Throne Room is God’s Throne Room
and outside this Throne Room is God’s Throne Room in God’s Throne Room

and here in this spotlight with golden waves lapping it
is the earth with wet and dry both chilled and fiery

turning on its solitary swivel and into the cloudy
drama before Him he sends from time to time

but always on time a few people of all races and
genders to let the rest know of Him in more than

mere words or gestural semaphore but by having
His eyes or His voice or His effective movements

echoing in a small and much tinnier as well as
tinier way His very majestic Presence as

Watcher and Creator and constant Influencer of even the
most mundane of our affairs praise and recognition

being our reverse telescopes directly into His
gaze or directly into the sound waves of His

voice though we might glimpse only one
corner of the table in the Throne Room where the

whole earth suspended above it in its congenial
atmosphere turns at ease even as we try our

might to explode its peacefulness with our
subatomic sabotage of the very fact that

we’re being watched by Him in detail and
through thoroughly loving eyes

3/25/2006 (from Coattails of the Saint)

Haiku / A Rhinoceros is Running the War

A rhinoceros –
beady eyes and quite small brain –
is running the war!

I’m sorry… The President of the United States was on the News Hour tonight defending his new strategy to “the nation,” and it was truly pathetic. This man has no grasp of anything beyond sloganized abstractions, even when he’s supposed to be giving details. His thinking is a tight little roundabout circle that goes round and round. He seems to bristle at any idea that he might look at things with more subtlety or even sensitivity. He seems to chortle at death. I can’t figure how this country came to the point where a single man can wage a war now so few people want. But a man so deeply inept and incapable of even thinking straight!

And why a rhinoceros? Plated and built like a tank, it seems the United States under its present President and government can only think militarily about anything. Charging forward blindly… rhino-like…

This blog is a poetry blog, and I am not good at political rant. But I’m 66 now, and I thought that Vietnam (when I marched against and helped shut down the Army Induction center in my hometown of Oakland, California), Johnson, Nixon and Reagan were as bad as it would get in my lifetime… that things would get better. Things seem to me far worse. And I’m frustrated at not storming out of the house and rallying, say, a huge march down mainstreet… with torches perhaps. To defy the tragic injustice “my” government is perpetrating in the world in a bogus because strategically misdirected “war on terror.”

May Allah’s Oceans of Mercy heave in the heavens for everyone on earth these days and redirect the souls of the hard-hearted among us towards peace.

Poem from: In the Realm of Neither

THE ENORMOUS CORRIDOR OF SORROW

In the enormous corridor of sorrow

masked Napoleonic pygmies play with human
souls in the
shapes of coke bottles and guided missiles

and the clatter they raise
is more deafening than silence but

leads to the same end the same bolted door

A gigantic wheel rolls down
sorrow’s enormous corridor aclattering

as if to challenge with grief its mere
invention as the era of slaughter

though it doesn’t matter

I can’t find my eyes among the rubble

A tsunami traded for the killer instinct in
the heart of man might set out a tea set
in the enormous tidal wave enough to
engender a pretense at civility though

no one finds himself more content
than the self-justified mass murderer

at home with his happy shadows

7/26/2005 (from In the Realm of Neither)

This poem was written at the height of the tragic summer war in Lebanon, and the sentiment continues into the seemingly endless day of tragedy in Iraq and elsewhere. Arrogance is the vice here, and Napoleon has always typified for me the arrogance of a leader who rather thinks he is God. It’s a huge mistake… and everyone suffers. Because at base they are intellectually, emotionally and spiritually stunted, and God intervenes, much to their surprise I’m sure, and cuts them down at the end.

Ghazal (from The Flame of Transformation Turns to Light)

GOD’S MONOTONE

The rain’s coming down outside my window – leaky pipes – a background
monotone –
Raven the black cat on deep burgundy bedspread – green eyes blazing in pure
round monotone –

The world’s assembled in a cunning way to appear real to us –
If we saw it in its true dimensions we might feel a real profound monotone

What delight in a squirrel rooting for seeds among tall grasses –
Birds at the feeder trilling their variable compound monotone!

My heart wants to explode half the time and ignite into a sparkling flare –
Sometimes taking great self-control to keep it at an underground monotone

Gates of sparkling golden roses open at a single breath –
Especially if accompanied by the low heartbeat’s homebound monotone

Underneath the surfaces of things and way behind appearances
A light shines against a screen of butterflies whose wings make a spellbound monotone

I sit at the feet of lions – ameen repeated over and over in their leonine purring –
And in the living roar of God’s Majesty’s long astounding monotone

6/16/2002 (from The Flame of Transformation Turns to Light)

New Haiku on DeenPort 1/14/07

The heart breaks to hear
any news now from Iraq…
good… bad… such hardship!

Another:

We broke in — smashed things…
killed the king — now we want to
make them pay for it…

Another Sunday morning of Meet the Press, Face the Nation, in which so-called policy-makers and pundits in their neat suits and perfect haircuts (so American!) mouth sad responses on either side to Bush’s “new strategy” while somehow the Iraqi people must cope every day with a hell licking their ankles at every turn. I don’t know how anyone can live that way…

The solution: is it now just a throw of the dice? Are the Armageddon wizards hoping for catastrophe, and then to compound it with an even deeper one, bombing at will anyone and anything (Somalia, possibly Iran, God forbid!) like a never-ending computer game?

Will the blood never stop dripping from their hands? Bush, Cheney, Blair, and others more nefarious because more hidden from view? Are we also not complicit somehow in our souls for this Seneca-like bloodbath, these tragic destinies heading for utter darkness?

Only Allah knows the solution, however the world founders, and may the stone ones begin to hear it… and He knows our heartbreak…

And from the Ash-Shifa of Qadi Iyad:
‘Uqba ibn ‘Amir said that the Prophet said, peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, “I will go ahead on your behalf and I will be a witness for you. By Allah, I am looking at the Water-Basin even now. I have been given the keys to the treasures of the earth. By Allah, I do not fear that you will associate (anything with Allah in idolworship) after me, but I fear that you will contend with each other for this world.”
(from Al-Bukhari and Muslim)

Poem from: Stories Too Fiery to Sing…

THE BALLAD OF THE TYRANT

The tyranny of Boulderoak the knavery of Dor
the flat out death at Zonderzee
the corpses on the floor

The scepter of the ruler in a leaden box of fire
you can’t describe the way the people
listen to the liar

If one soul shout they all shout if one soul yells they yell
but if one soul suddenly sang
they’d send that soul to Hell

The air is fogged with extra noise the ears are clogged with ice
I can’t imagine what their hearts are like
but bungalows for mice

If one tells truth here eyes go wild arms wave feet kick
that person might as well be stoned
death less painful less thick

The one-eyed man is king here except he’s put to death
the tyrant can’t let anyone who sees
take a single breath

The night falls they’re all eyeless voiceless heartless cold
the gold chair the tyrant sits on
keeps their poor souls sold

Kill the tyrant hang him by his feet or rip his head off
he’d stand back up and grow it back
and be like Boris Karloff

The people make the tyrant bold the people keep him strong
until they change he’ll keep them down
and bang them like a gong

9/10/2005 (from Stories Too Fiery to Sing Too Watery to Whisper)

Poem by Tiel Aisha Ansari

Shouting God

 

 

The hills above The Dalles
are striped with snow and last year’s stubble.
Hawks hunt along the rows.
The hills were shouting God,
the trees were shouting God,
the fence-posts and frozen puddles
all joined the silent chorus.
The road under my wheels was shouting God,
and I too, I was shouting God,
God, God, there is no other.
The hills are shouting God!
_____________________

Please visit her blogsite… all her poems are quite astonishing… Tiel Aisha Ansari (see my blogroll, poetry and Sufism/Islam links)

Haiku… George & Osama

“Osama… meet George…
Here’s bread and water to eat
the rest of your days…”

I’m frankly a bit obsessed. The “Islamic Haiku” I’ve been writing for DeenPort are turning decidedly political… and I thought this one might not be appropriate for a website that can be a forum for political views, but is not so dedicated.

Here’s a haiku which is the result of a deep frustration… and the scenario is of course that these two “contenders” who are now more or less mirror images of each other, are left, say, on a desert island with just themselves (though I’d throw in a few more to liven it up a bit, Cheney, Zarqawi… is he still dead?, etc. to make it a real Lord of the Flies ), and let them work it out between them, and may the best devil win.

This could start a new genre, if not in haiku (there’s no seasonal reference here, no turning at the end to a kind of burst of epiphany), at least in the knock-knock joke department.

Here’s another one:

“Osama… meet George…
This melting iceberg your home…
Oh… and polar bears!”

New Haiku on DeenPort 1/11/07

We burn the town down…
then we send in more fire trucks
to patrol the smoke?

It’s the morning after The Decider’s decision to wreak more havoc in Iraq, with massive collateral damage (by western soldiers, never mind their own strife-killings) unreported by the western media, masses more American soldiers either dead or maimed for life, also hidden away from the public eye, and a President, who, sorry, is looking more and more like the “What Me Worry?” Alfred E. Neuman of Mad Comics (and this was not a willed hallucination on my part, but at some point in his televised speech that face emerged from his own…).

Somehow these quick haiku almost have more potential for impact than the miles of words we’re hearing from both sides of the issue… “send more,” “bring them back…” “we don’t know…” I’m at a loss myself… yesterday watching the sparrows outside my window at the birdfeeder instead. They don’t start wars. They may argue a little over the perches…

But I was struck by the aplomb last night, the reckless rhetoric by the man who set a match to a country, gloated in its burning, refuses to see the reality of the situation (tiny glints and only reluctantly), and is pouring more gasoline on the fire, or as my haiku above suggests (valid metaphors, Oh God please!), the place has burned down and NOW we send firetrucks? … but that isn’t it either. People are living there, trying their best to eat and sleep and wake up the next day… What right have we to cause all this horror? And now, are we just “patrolling the smoke?”

I pray Allah open the hearts of everyone involved, and bring justice to ruthlessness…

Which will come to pass, have no doubts…

Today’s Islamic Haiku on DeenPort

Democrats cowards…
Republicans criminals…
I watch the sparrows…

This is a traditional haiku (5-7-5 syllable lines) of a decidedly political bent, to coincide with today’s touted announcement by America’s Commander in Chief of his losing strategy in Iraq, too little too late and never justified… and basically with evil intentions in its inception.  I think this haiku also has a traditional flavor in that many Chinese poets commented, from their exile in the mountains, on their life in court and its complexly ephemeral nature… “Court intrigues come and go, the mountains go on forever,” kind of thing… though, of course, the haiku was developed by the Japanese, and their concentration on nature and its messages was to more or less shut out the “political” world altogether… (though now I’ll go look through my Japanese haiku books to see if I’m wrong…)

 (Note: I will be continuing to contribute Haiku to DeenPort, insha’Allah, as originally conceived of and encouraged by Omar Tufail, but today’s seemed particularly relevant… and may have needed a bit of explaining?)

For us, the antidote to all the world’s evils and disasters is in the following poem, a medicine we can all imbibe to become centered again… The Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, seen through the eyes of love.

Ghazal on the Prophet, peace be upon him

THE PROPHET MUHAMMAD WALKED IN

The Prophet Muhammad walked in – his face a moon – his head represented by God’s flame
The room filled with rose-scent – the windows with doves – in our hearts we scented God’s flame

How on earth did a man like this come among us? How beloved of Allah – how kind!
All who saw him as nothing but a mad relative became demented by God’s flame

The world was reversed by him – inside became outside – outside became in –
Each word came from Truth’s conflagration – descended by God’s flame

It burned up this old world and replaced it with a pure one –
Both world and self entering purifying fire – even if resenting God’s flame

His touch was sure – his tread so light – his smile creation’s first morning on earth –
In his eyes was inexpressible perfection – augmented by God’s flame

His voice pronounced words spaced like individual pearls on a string –
We hear them as clearly today – as though aged and fermented by God’s flame

A star straight above him in the Unseen points him out wherever he goes –
Allah’s increasing love for him through the centuries – as portended by God’s flame

As the Prophet passes we long for him to stay – to turn to us – bathing in his light –
Allah’s most beloved before anything was even invented by God’s flame

His sweetheart – His intimate – His Messenger – His most cherished creation –
Just hearing his name pours new stars into the sky – supplemented by God’s flame

In a dark smoky corner of the world – as far as China – as near as our jugular vein –
The pulse of the Divine throbs out his name – linked forever with God’s – implemented by God’s flame

This firmament – each lineament – each filament – each element –
Ameen – his graces flow without limit or measurement – documented by God’s flame!
________
6/20/2002 (from The Flame of Transformation Turns to Light)