Sonnets

A lot of things are said about respect
And all of its effects upon your heart
That beats a path to waters that reflect
The visage of your soul once you depart
Sometimes it means to rise from where you sit
To be, with the angelic order, one
Sometimes it means to let another spit
The final word and still your burning tongue
It means to let a rumor starve and die
Appoint your heart above what’s in your head
To weigh the need to ask the how and why
And leave unsaid what’s better left unsaid
        Respect: it is the currency of souls
        The passage widens once you pay the tolls

You tell me that I use a word too many
But words are much like colors, don’t you see
How pleased or how offended we’re by any
Diverging value or intensity
You paint a wall a certain shade of sky
Alaskan, Early Morn or Shooting Star
They’re blue if you just plan on getting by
But color-wise you won’t go very far
So when I use a hundred words to say
What you think just requires twenty five
You’ve only heard the quarter of a gray
That I relayed four times intensified
    Our wordiness is hard on one who rues
    The value and intensity of hues

When we consider generosity,
We think of those possessed of wealth and time
Who give with or without the vanity
That often taints a gift with hues of crime.
And then we hear the term afresh from those
Who saw its splendor in prophetic light,
For giving matters when the giver knows
The value of what’s given, all despite
The ignorance and bliss ingratitude
Of them who walk the earth in heedlessness
While harvesting the riches that accrued
Upon the breaths of those who do with less.
SubhanAllah is charity that turns
The world despite the punishment it earns.

The ummah is as one body.

We wonder where the hate we see begins;
We blame the haters and their mentoring,
But seldom see the damage that our sins
May wreak upon the hearts they’re entering.
We hate our children when we fail their cause;
We hate our spouses as we burden them;
We even hate our siblings, all because
We give our selves a love we cannot stem.
So hear the words the minbar sends our way:
“Allah! He does not change a people who
Refuse to change their selves.” Should we not say,
Your family should matter more than you?
A thorn on Cherry Street by any means
Can cause a vein to hemorrhage on Deans.

It’s true that sticks and stones may break my bones
But words are such a different projectile
For even do the deadliest of drones
Annihilate the living in a while
But, words: they lodge themselves within a heart
In some dark corner that the jinn know well
And there they linger as a poison dart
Secreting the intoxicants of hell
Remember now when he with tongue so mild
Had turned, a brokenhearted man, to Ṭāʾif
To be rejected, driven and reviled
In what was then his weakest time in life
  Yet when the wrath of angel sprang above
  He held it back with words of patient love

The silence of the night is loudest when
The sounds of sleep and timber creak are one;
To rise as rebels, wont to fall again
As if their song of rise and fall were done,
For silence is a failure of the mind
To hear what it refuses to let in:
A creature that by nature is defined
In terms of what is absent though met in
The captivating charms of solitude
That free the soul unto the forest lush
With sapling thoughts that spring from soil imbued
With nourishment endowed in waters’ gush.
The silence of the night is soft and mild
When chanced upon the breath of sleeping child.

I often wonder how to reconcile
This paradox in knowledge that I see:
To slog through books in earnest, all the while
Admiring the unlettered Nabi.
And then I heard this wisdom: all the toil
The seeker puts into sincere seeking,
The sleepless hours burned by midnight oil
To brave a climb that’s marked by endless peaking,
Produces such sophisticated minds
Well honed upon the stone of scholarship,
But even what the mill of learning grinds
Despite its many tries to take a sip
Can’t reach the fountain flowing beyond sins
To where prophetic intellect begins.