Word, like wind, cuts through you / Withers all but true you
If time were in your hands, you’d have the power
To alter destinies, and if you sought,
You’d travel a millennium or hour,
Accelerating at the speed of thought.
Consider now the placing of the sun
In one hand, while the other takes the moon;
It’s one way lordship over time is spun:
Balāghah serving waḥy on a spoon.
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.
Sometimes it takes a simple sprain
To reconnect the heart and brain
I make the journey every week
To sit under this tree
That shades me from the burning heat
Of ignorance; I’m free
To breathe the air its leaves exhale,
To hear the rustle sound
That makes its fragrant blossoms sail
In silence to the ground.
Hope is a call
That springs from within
It’s voiced by the faith
Of a soul that is in
A struggle for freedom
From falling in sin
It’s okay to fall
But best heed the call
And rise up again
strength is a function
of patience
but when it is not
it morphs into what
may be the destruction
of nations
Who can conceive of a fruit
That’s different and better with every taste
Who can conceive of an angel
With six hundred wings laying vision to waste
Who can conceive of a horseman
Who gallops for five hundred years all a trice
Yet cannot escape the shade of a tree
In the Garden we call Paradise
Who can conceive of such vastness
And levels of magnitude
No poet may dare but a prophet who speaks
From what is revealed to him could
We tend to be extravagant
With time we’ve hoarded, drawn and spent
On things we do not need at all
And happiness that came and went,
So let’s not say we have no time
When what we really mean to say
Is we have none to give.
The journey is long
The weather is fine
The toll of the traffic
Is rather benign
We may not be friends
For friends can be found
In spaces where faces
And buttons abound
We talk and we listen
We listen and sigh
Away all the moments
That turn into sky
There’s so much to say
And much more to think
But words fall like pebbles
To splash and then sink
The journey is over
It ends like the rain
To leave us to thirst for
Its passing again
If ever you feel good about
Yourself, then you had better know
The devil’s got you, there’s no doubt;
You see he’s made from fire, so
He understands the nafs how you
Cannot, no matter what you do.