Khalid Mukhtar

Word, like wind, cuts through you / Withers all but true you

Archives for February 2023

Brothers

· · 

Salaam upon Yunus
For the noble frustration he felt
At the obstinate rejection of his message
That frustration would be enough
For us beggars to fly into paradise

But the mission of Yunus lay
In not fleeing
Not until the Word came
And so a physical darkness
Was sent from high to surround him
In the fiery pit of of a beast under water
That he may reflect upon
The greater darkness
He had left his flock in
With the fire awaiting them

Such is rahmah
That led him to cry out
The ayah karimah

An ayah nestled in a chapter
Of The Book
A chapter titled
The Prophets

It brings us full circle
To that heavy day outside Taif
Where a man sat bleeding
As he fled an angry mob
Not because he had given up on them
But because he hadn't

He was an ayah karimah

It is opportune then
That another man came to him
A slave hailing from the land of Nineveh
The land of Yunus
Bearing refreshment for the Hashimi
With bloodied sandals

It was in the legacy of Yunus
To bring relief to his noble brother
The last of the brethren
Still on his mission

Gone

· · 

Every joy a passing moment
Every grief a passing moment
Every moment gone
Like water
Lost in the whorls of a dream

Passage

· · 

The farther we go down the road of time
The wider the field of our vision
That when we look back to things from the past
To measure what is and what isn’t

We take in so much, much more than we had
The moment the moments came down
It colors the grays calamity cast
With tinctures of azure and brown

But some things can only be read
Once time and its cloaks have been shed

Release

· · 

Have you
set free your fears
into the endless blue
before the Will Eternal will
have you