To you, a boy grieving. How does it taste?
Art from Europeana on Unsplash.
They say the tongue is three times more incisive & sweeter
than the blade or honey, so you thrust sugar into your words, splitting
gratitude into syllables: Al ham du li llah. That is to say, the palm
tree hurls at you the stone you toss at it. There must be a cluster
in your larynx, a mystique lollygagging on the tip of your tongue.
Last night, you tasted another sorrow—a taste clinging to the alcove
of your senses, mollycoddling the palate with loss—that couldn’t
be unlearned. & today, your friend smirks, then asks, “To you, a boy,
grieving. How does it taste?” & you say, “Death calls to silence,
a clarion call to sacrifice; muazzin calls to prayer, a clarion call
for gratitude.” Smile. Two different things. He doesn’t know
that grieving tastes like the taciturn cadence of prayers divulged
before dawn, a conversation between a soul & the divine. You use
a brushstick against your tongue & say, ‘grief! Its bitterness,
the herbs of nostalgia, blended into a potion that both heals
&wounds. It’s like Arabic coffee shared in sombre conclave—
each sip, a communion with the past & a nod to a fickle future.’
It is a story poem, a narrative etched in the language of loss,
a sepia-toned laughter, an unfiltered taste of emotions. You ask
him how it tastes & he replies with a frown. You should
not blame him; he hasn’t lost anything, not even happiness
or a word, or what is loss, if not a word & memory? He fears
memory more than he fears god, or what is memory, if not hurts
& names we all want to unlearn? A time we all want to reclaim.
So you tell him to open his mouth, then let a capsule & three droplets
of lime water sit on it. He must have felt the bitterness & sourness
in his tongue & throat. He salivates again & again. You say, ‘It is more
than the heaviness his taste buds hold.’ Then he cries & says,
‘This is what you are carrying with you every day?’ & you say,
‘no. not every day, but pints of seconds. My taste buds refuse to let it go.’
You concave your mouth into a praying ground, then tender your tongue
like a threadbare mat for healing: God, dress me in gaiety, far from my losses;
those close to me. & to those who they might ask how grieving tastes also.
Art from the Art Institute of Chicago on Unsplash.
AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL, EVEN A CORPSE CANNOT FICTIONALISE ITS STORY BEFORE THE NECROSIS OF ITS BODY.
“And We have fastened every person’s deeds to their neck, and on the Day of Resurrection, We shall
bring forth for them a book which they will find wide open. [It will be said:] ‘Read your book. You alone
are sufficient as a reckoner against yourself this Day.’”
— Surah Al-Isra (17:13–14)
Our Imān is leaning like a minaret after an earthquake—
still reaching for heaven, but uncertain of its footing.
We dither, disappearing unsensational as shadows before
our dreams. & we wish God could guide us through this
c[o]urse, rough time, again. There are so many things
God forbids us: like morphing one’s body into
a compound
of alcoholic gourd. He commands us to do many things also:
bowling oneself like a rope into a knot of prayer
at a specific time. Or walking freely on this street
without preying on another’s dermis? But see, we’ve
chosen to burn salmons into ash, puffing its smoke
& blacken faith like a cooking clay-pot. Don’t you
know disbelief has a way of painting the lights,
the sounds
to be something other than what we know it is?
Often, silence doesn’t just incise deep into a body
& unvocal the host without a genesis. It begins,
somehow, as a lesion, then inflames the larynx
before degenerating the muscle. People are becoming
oblivion from the earth like grains of sand slipping
silently through an hourglass, each one disappearing
into the cyclopean, dark expanse below, lost forever
in the relentless passage of time. The thing scary,
even, about my country, is every[/thing]where
we steps on is the bones of our innocent long gone
brothers. I mean, we crusade ourselves into miniature
stone that can easily break without signs of fracture.
Has it ever occurred to us why people become stiff,
unspoken of what left their bodies before building
home for them down the ground? To me, to miss life
before life is to tremble an unborn child before God.
Today, I read again, in the descending scripture, where God,
pluralizes himself before promises, promises of recreating
a flesh after the burnt ones, & drawing a threshold of death-life
for the deriders. So, I am mourning the aftermath of thingness
before me. & I wish, again, I do not taste the aftereffect
of the holocaust after becoming a corpse.
Art from The New York Public Library on Unsplash.
Ashes of Assumption.
For the sixteen hunters burnt to death and Deborah.
Isn’t it outlandish,
to dig the graves
of strangers by assumptions?
I have seen where light turns
to fire;
where gaiety of flying home,
safely, dispirits the body of a parrot
to ash.
Here, people gathered,
constellating their detestation
& blacksmithing it into matches,
then cultivating souls, wishing
it grows sadness in the eyes
of the owners.
In my country, some people find
the will of 16 hunters to subsist
on ambuscade & buried them in the fire
like some turnip pedigrees.
Today, I saw a man trying to hold equity
with his hands, but it became watery,
evanesced into the sky as if he never
touches anything—everything evanesces
& left
a snippet of scars.
then surge.
What we fail to know is faith:
cosseting justice’s fur to creep her into our pockets.
The skin’s tincture is nothing but a symbol,
a symbol for unity. each time we try to
latch onto love, darkness enshrouds our hearts,
& our skins morph: black, white, yellow
& others.
This thing called justice facsimile no one,
but choose who to mentor, free & castigate.
This is not about a body. not about the flame.
It’s, of course, about the distress of
hands extension to a saviour,
but then no one
comes for aid. Everybody watches until hands
make a living woman depart from the autumn
core of her image. May their souls rest
in peace. Ameen.
