how can you be lost
if you are exactly where
He wants you to be
no khalid you are
on your way as long as you
don’t think you’ve arrived
Poetry
On Altruism
We give and often think we love to give
But hear the warner school us about giving
How can we be called altruistic if
Our contributions barely dent our living
Our paragons they come from two: one glad
To leave behind their home and wealth and kin
The other hosting them with all they had
Despite the difficulty they were in
Such was their love for him who bound their hearts
In sweet eternal brotherhood that when
He called for contributions to the cause
One gave one half, the other, everything
So khalid, swipe your card and puff and preen
You’re all the altruism you have seen
Inspired by a portion of this Tafsir session delivered by Shaykh Amin on May 5.
Boomerang Pie
The bitter center baked in deep
Deep within the luscious pie
Of “how could they”
Is “how could I”
That Hurts
Why do we press our lips together
To hold back a tear
Maybe that holds the clue
To why when you
Are smitten there
Do I wince here
Reflecting
a puddle for some
an oasis for others
a mirror for all
Sunny
Bask in the sunshine
of constant tauhīd
Dip your toes into
the stream of ikhlās
Lay your head down on
the mossy green pillow
Of ‘ishq till you hymn salawāt
Idiot 2.0
Inspired by a segment of Shaykh Amin’s uplifting talk on the night of the twenty-fifth.
We like numbers We like charts We like charts with numbers That tell us when and where the new moon will rise Not for us to see No that would be Self-defeating for it requires Getting up No, it’s just so we know When to take the day off For what’s to see Just a sickle in the sky Reminding us of our own truncated intellects Apathy Is when we relegate science To brew us A cup of tea Boiled in our own stupidity Steeped in our uppity Self-absorbed amazon-dot-com impassivity What’s that, khalid Did I call you stupid… No, no, of course not I was just pointing out That while the air is crisp and cold And the sky is vast and blue with hope And the time of dusk is nigh And night is held back by A chance to look up and peek through the springing foliage To spy A sliver of moon Born again Ushering in a new beginning Out with the old Breaths, deaths In with the new You Hope as vast as the sky That begins with a silver streak To wax and wane For the next four weeks No, I was just pointing out That stepping out and looking up would take significantly longer than swiping left And tapping twice A new iOS update is now available.
It’s Ramadan
You're well into This month to give You fell into This well to live Another chance To give your best Give your thirst Give your hunger Give your each desire Give your hours Give your nights In that sweet tilaawah Give your wealth Give it well Give it till your giving Seems like madness In the air To all creatures living Give your kindness Send a flood Into grieving others Give your patience Not a word Spent dividing brothers If your giving Makes good sense Give some more Until It doesn’t No rhyme or reason It’s Ramadan
Song
What’s wisdom but a generous word That when it’s kindly spoken It soon repairs an ailing heart That someone else has broken For every heart has chambers which Receive the Name Divine To resonate its praises through An intricate design That when one breaks it interrupts The orchestra of souls And notes that rise to heaven rise Despite the many holes Yet words of kindness well restore The timbre and the tone To send the human song of praise Unto the highest throne And that in turn supplies the nūr Whence gentle words are spoken But how could such a wisdom be If hearts were never broken
Change of Address
One of the greatest signs of Allah’s lordliness is to watch his rahmah unfold upon his unassuming slave, most notably in how the man welcomes death. All his life this man lives simply. He is no scholar. He is no philosopher. He can barely articulate his thoughts. Every time he disagrees with someone around him, he finds himself corrected by a dozen other voices. Yet, he gifts the last word to anyone who is in conversation with him. He does this with kindness, even gratitude. Every time. So much so that you might think him a nobody. What you may miss is that he is very good at being that. Here now, in his final moments, so efficient is his economy with words, so powerful his choice in them, so frequent his recitation of the only word that matters, and so thorough his mending of fences with all his kin, that a lifetime of scholarship and pontification may be sacrificed for the nūr that illuminates his face. Much intellect shines now through the humor in his eyes. His eagerness to meet his Lord is tangible, electric, in the air, betrayed only by his brow dancing ever so slightly in response to an oft raised index finger. If we could see a man’s true worth as he dies we can begin to make sense of his life because what he has truly accomplished is now before our eyes What a man!