.".".The look of love death has on its face and in its fathomless eyes as behind the burning irises legions upon legions of angels file up and down a spiraling staircase carrying love-notes and bringing back blessings and reprieves..."" I'm really not sure why this particular collection of my poems is called Blood Songs, the title it has had since beginning the first poem of the book written in October of 2000, and though, as with other titles of mine, not necessarily threading a theme throughout, yet the title stands notwithstanding... and so it stands.
.".".The look of love death has on its face and in its fathomless eyes as behind the burning irises legions upon legions of angels file up and down a ...
These are poems written over nearly a year in 1996, ecstatic, bewildered, exploratory, celebratory, remembering Allah in all the usual and unusual places, seeing (God willing) His Light through all things, people and places. A trajectory arc of heart over and through time. Hoping by these flights to acknowledge His Generosity to us in adversity and peace.
These are poems written over nearly a year in 1996, ecstatic, bewildered, exploratory, celebratory, remembering Allah in all the usual and unusual pla...
This collection from 2013 continues the intended trajectory of a lifetime's work that celebrates and posits the direct perception that The Divine Reality faces us from everywhere and in literally every circumstance of each moment of our lives. In this, the world's soul envelope has been turned inside out, revealing itself in images of light. Rather than invoking metaphors for experience, my project has been to "move from the word as symbol toward the word as reality" (as W.C. Williams said about the poetry of Ezra Pound), words not standing for an already completed experience, physical or...
This collection from 2013 continues the intended trajectory of a lifetime's work that celebrates and posits the direct perception that The Divine Real...
The pleasure of feeling the poem discovering itself is always a particular joy in reading this poet -- especially so because the voyage of discovery each poem seems to make is, finally, a journey toward the light - whether inside or outside, grand and glorious or fine and concentrated and elusive and just or almost entirely out of reach... yet somehow still in there or out there somewhere, waiting to be found. (From the Preface, by Tom Clark) These are kinds of Sufi narrative poems, but not stories exactly and more like ecstatic perceptions and surreal notions leading (God willing) to Light.
The pleasure of feeling the poem discovering itself is always a particular joy in reading this poet -- especially so because the voyage of discovery e...
Eternity shimmers in the room among the bright solid furniture that is the furniture of Eternity the bookcases and lamps the bed I wake from and the sound of the silence here that is its child the swirling ocean of time washing us in its blessings in constant motion of cylinder within cylinder of intangible turning invisible to the touch in which we age minute by minute inwardly forward but motionless in Eternity impossible to calculate except in angelic terms whose bright silver dazzles the mind beyond its usual earthly limitations whose walls and doors and streets and skies are sweetly...
Eternity shimmers in the room among the bright solid furniture that is the furniture of Eternity the bookcases and lamps the bed I wake from and the s...
As Muslims who pray the five obligatory prayers each day of our lives, when able we orient ourselves toward Mecca, located in what is now Saudi Arabia, from wherever we happen to find ourselves, farflung in some island fastness, or out in desert dunes, or in a New York hotel room. There are boat people who tie up and face Mecca right in their boats, saintly Moroccan merchants who fling their carpets down just behind the counter where they sell embroidery thread to very particular customers (I am a witness). We can't get too "far out" when we stop to face Mecca five times and more a day, or in...
As Muslims who pray the five obligatory prayers each day of our lives, when able we orient ourselves toward Mecca, located in what is now Saudi Arabia...
Sufi poems from the love-ocean, washing at the shores of this world and the next, with God willing a depth charge or two to find new love grottos, new heights in underwater drownings, new depths in aerial flights. Contradictions? As Walt Whitman said, "Do I contradict myself? Yes, I contradict myself I contain multitudes." And if we rub the self to its tissue-thin reality, God's Light shines more thoroughly through.
Sufi poems from the love-ocean, washing at the shores of this world and the next, with God willing a depth charge or two to find new love grottos, new...
We're born in a relationship with theology. Nurtured in the womb by other than our means, born into the world at large, at very large, from our meditative seclusion, our khalwa, the Arabic for spiritual retreat (often practiced in a closet-like room just enough for a devotee to sit comfortably) we emerge into a theological world, willy-nilly. As soon as we take a breath of worldly oxygen we're in a tight relationship with the whole God-system, as believers or non-believers, until our last breath leaves us. So in the title, it's a Throne that is perpendicular, at an always angle, to all that...
We're born in a relationship with theology. Nurtured in the womb by other than our means, born into the world at large, at very large, from our medita...
The sound of geese over the house and in the house the prayer on the Prophet The sound of geese over the house and in the house Allah loves you The mountains are full of light and their gigantic shadows are eloquent since they're leaning against the sky and out into space with their crags and outcrops No sound can scale in a dimension commensurate with the pure expanse of it The sound of geese over the house puts a dome of life above us and a sea of life below us and a world of life all around us and a shaft of living Light inside us
The sound of geese over the house and in the house the prayer on the Prophet The sound of geese over the house and in the house Allah loves you The mo...
Poems of Sufi Devotional nature, infused with the lights of nature, and praising and loving Allah The God of nature, and of all, each thread of which vibrates with God's Love in nature and out of nature.
Poems of Sufi Devotional nature, infused with the lights of nature, and praising and loving Allah The God of nature, and of all, each thread of which ...