After Jelaluddin Muhammad Rumi
These are not poems,
just sounds tattered by memory.
Eyes full of dust, wind and weeping.
Hearts borrowed from unfulfilled pilgrimages.
Letters etched in the sky’s calligraphy,
music knit into the air.
Sun washing a pair of feet in shredded snow.
Seas growing the distance between lands.
These are not poems,
they are hiding places.
1.
What is memory to someone
who has surrendered his light to the moon and can
no longer differentiate the earth from the sea?
2.
Your shadows hang upon my walls
like the lanes of Rabat inundated with sunlight.
Once when I wrote in their reflection,
and the sea splayed the wind into two.
3.
The heart is a tricky place to hide in.
The more you try to conceal yourself,
the more it bares you to the world.
4.
Defending nomads comes to me naturally.
I find it difficult to remain unaffected by the necessity of geography. Guard my heart against a shelter. Keep moving around. Find a home in timelessness, in homelessness.
5.
Language is a pair of syllables strung together.
Art is what is left of them when unmasked.
6.
Absence is an ointment.
That explains why I never heal.
7.
How can you accuse nomads of infidelity
when your own feet won’t stay
in one place?
8.
This is the silhouette of a poem that is yet to arrive.
This is a morning written in the jagged letters of your name.
9.
Your eyes are full of empty rooms and old longings.
Let me take your hands, and hold them for a while.
For once. Please.
10.
The sound of your name is my Azaan.
I keep coming to worship it.
This is how it happens:
you enter a rhyme
and leave a
qasida
11.
If you want to go home,
start from the wind.
The brave walk through the fire,
but the fearless move through the wind.
12.
Once I wrote from your hands,
and the poems were no different.
