Video: Interlude, from I Imagine a Lion

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Video: Sparrow on the Prophet’s Tomb (peace be upon him)

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Commentary on DeenPort Haiku

The war’s fourth birthday…
Congratulations? ka-boom!
(all predicitions true)…
While some celebrate, others mourn, and others die – many, many others. My incomprehension soars that anyone could continue to support this war except for covert reasons that never seem to get articulated. Iraqi and American lives have been massively and tragically disrupted, the middle-class intelligentsia of [...]

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Poem for his Mawlid, peace be upon him

 
MUHAMMAD’S BIRTH
About his birth the whole world knows
in the depths of its atoms.
Amina bore him and he was immediate
in his praise of Allah.
Some say he first did sajda, others
that he spoke the shahada
and then was silent.
Already at birth he was the Prophet of Unity, the
movie played backwards
from its glorious end.
His father Abdallah, from the tribe [...]

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Poem: in a lighter vein…?

 
FIRST THE KNEES GIVE OUT
First the knees give out then the
ship’s rudder then the bank account then the canary cage
then Uncle Henry’s moustache then the tablecloth begins to
fray the chair falls apart doors fall off their hinges the
cows start speaking in tongues the
eyes blur our food turns back to its
origins in the earth or on [...]

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New Poem: Clarifying Vision

CLARIFYING VISION
An alchemist looks at his laboratory and sees
penguins drinking tea
He looks again and sees it’s his beakers bubbling
A king looks out at his courtiers and sees them
hurling stones
He looks again and sees it’s their tongues moving
An aerialist looks down and sees empty space
sliced in two
He looks again and sees it’s his tightrope quivering
If we [...]

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Poem: The Fact of the Matter

 
THE FACT OF THE MATTER
The fact of the matter is that there’s
no fact and no matter
Waves of light across corrugated panes of space
each scallop of which cups rainbows and
other dazzling prismatic distractions
such as wars poverty venality office furniture
romance gone sour romance rekindled
all the various snake-holes and zigzag
courses we travel to go from A to B
never [...]

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New Poem: Clocks Set Ahead

CLOCKS SET AHEAD
Clocks set ahead one hour
but darkness is just as dark
Darkness after all is timeless
Darkness doesn’t polish its shoes
Whoever’s left in the darkness
stands ghostly in the mist
Shades and shadows blend together
One voice cracks the darkness
Every darkness has some light in it
Every light some dark
The eye alone sees timelessly
light and dark as God enters it
Then [...]

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Ghazal: At Rumi’s Tomb

IN RUMI’S TOMB IN KONYA
A sky shaped like a face – no it can’t be that
A wingéd horse on fire in the middle of the air – no it can’t be that
A sound of bells that burns from the feet to the heart
A whisper of hidden words falling from the top of a tree [...]

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from Becoming the Mountain / Poem

 
Never underestimate the power of
impossible desire
Flight would never have occurred to us nor
loss of lesser self with God’s encompassing
Presence and ultimate All-pervasiveness
in every domain of our being
Saying what was unknown to us before
on prophetic tongues out of our usual human shallows
turning the tragic momentariness of our life
into a cup of delicious and deliriously
tasted expansion the [...]

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