In a world with no time for poetry
we still have to die.
It would be so convenient if we could just
turn in our badge with our
full-color picture on it, go into a room
set aside for that purpose at the
corporate office
and evaporate, our desk left in order,
instructions on the
computer for the
one who fills our
shoes.
But the earth itself is alive, its roots and its tendrils,
and even minerals are part of the food-chain
in the deep dark loam.
Air pushes itself in, shoving aside 40-story buildings
like a vaporized Jolly Green giant
to swirl around the
newly enamored, the
incessantly dejected, the old man watching at his window
for death,
the young girl wearing it next to her
skin on the
inside of her
coat.
Our bodies are ticking, their time is limited where they can
carry out the wishes and desires of the
unlimited spirit, but while they’re here
they get welts on their legs, exude fluids and
perfumes, live in a
strictly practical world, no time for
nonsense, while their
hair grows in ghost-land as long as the
anchor rope of the phantom galleon,
and minute mites like birds in branches settle down on our
eyelashes, thoughts like
ribbons of incandescence curve through us as
wide as the Niger,
and as we sit the walls around us become
obsolete, the hillside that
emerges as the
house dissolves, full of
unused warrens and
ant-entrances, blows away from
underneath us in a fine powder heading back to
The Fashioner.
_______________________
1990, from A Maddening Disregard for the Passage of Time, soon to be published)
Ecstatic Exchange / Poetry of Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore 
What can I say? True music. Where every note is meaning. Every beat a reminder that we are a song bound together from the trembling chords of that original RESONANCE.
I am made to think of the Cavatina of Beethoven: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lTOcjSRvCI
Only in this poem, HIS name is painted even more clearly for all to see: “The Fashioner.”
Alhamdulillah
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THE DEEPEST GROUND
My latest writing desk is a
large square flattish book
called: “The Great King… King of Assyria,”
Metropolitan Museum of Art publication showing the
bas reliefs in their
collection, and to see these
flat figures with Assyrian eyes and noses doing their
almost two-dimensional dance along the flat surface of those
ancient walls sets me
going in the dark directions of
poetry, to fall into crumbling dust, let my
borders and their
border-guards down, follow the
slow or swift drift to the
Ground, with a
capital “G”, sink into the
Assyrian Ground of anonymous being to re-arrive among
talkative columns overlooking a clear blue sea,
talk among those columns with the
long-dead, see through their
almond eyes, have their
slightly curled smiles like taut
bows in the hands of master
archers, those
curled beards like fluted
columns themselves, or like the
Rastafarian heads of ropey black hair in our
own time, sound of
sistrum, O
sound the
sistrum and bring out the
dancers, we’re going to
crumble through the
dust of all
dissolutions and re-
emerge long dead and already ancient to walk along the
shoreline and call out with no
voice but
majestic echoes that come curling
all the way up into the
late twentieth century to
rattle among
subway cars, fly
up against the
labyrinthine walls of our
overpopulated cities
to see if anything at all, any of those cries
that arise out of the
deepest Ground of our
beings, can be
heard.
______________________
5/5/90 (from A Maddening Disregard for the Passage of Time, soon to appear)
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Wow, what unique structure and flow.
I’ll be looking forward to more submissions in the future.
Thanks for posting.
🙂
David Bohmiller
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Daniel, and I mean this sincerely, your poems make me sing and dance.Blessings!
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