Tax Collector
Your sorrow looted the
intelligence
Off our hearts
Your pain the tax collecting
auctioneer
Of our hearts
That forbidden sacred secret
for even
The holy ones [1]
Your love whispered upon the
ears
Of our hearts
End.
Betwixt her wet eyelashes
bowed in obeisance performing ablution with the holy water of her
tears, setting my Self afire, drop rolling after drop, flame flaring
upon flame. Alas! Remains a heart smoldered leaving none but the ashes
of these poems and my hollow burnt eyes, brim-filled with the afflatus
of her darkness.
Lo! This evanescent moment,
indeed so distinguished from all other moments, I am no longer a man
but an eye, midst the charred shards of my shattered Self, reading the
voiceless verbiage of her dark skin:
The ridge of her bent spine,
the cathedral of knowledge, built upon the foundation of humanity’s
lust for progress—a moment ago comforting luxury and now suffocating
garbage. To untrained eyes an old black woman seeking the pittance of a
wage, to mine blind eyes a Divine Cognoscenti [2]
rummaging through the Divine Knowledge, lanterns of guidance hang upon
the lofty walls of this cathedral by her trembling svelte arms.
Underneath the shade of her
vapid eyebrow, I find the Mihrab [3] wherein my
Self drown in prostration, eyeless wearing the goggles of her eyes
diving deep the eddies of her darkness, snatching the glittering sable
pearls of Paradise, eternal pearls strung upon the tents of the
Prophets, pearls strewn the littoral of the shoreless sea of Divine
Love.
Wearing her lips for wings,
ethereally soaring along the hot sighs of her sorrow, smoothly gliding
the confessions over the infectious sins of my life, searching the
skies for that Divine Beloved—the giver of death—to bestow upon I the
respite from my Self and in the last of my hour singing the avowal of
her darkened destiny—the last sail of my voyage and the last verse of
my pen.
Background: Jeanette (63) from
Temba in South Africa is a grandmother looking after 8 grandchildren
whose parents died of AIDS. To help pay for their school fees she
spends most of her time on the rubbish dump shifting through tons of
rubbish to collect tin cans to recycle. From this she earns the
equivalent of £2 per week.
[1] When the
Lord created Adam, he was endowed with infinite knowledge which none of
the angels in the heavens ever knew, hence the enmity of Satan. Indeed
that whisper of that knowledge makes this 63-year-old African woman to
strive strenuously to gain funds to pay for her grandchildren’s
schooling.
[2] Divine
Cognoscenti is the translation of an Arabic word ‘Aref who is a
righteous person learnt piety not from books, but received a gift of
specialized knowledge from the Lord.
[3] Mihrab
is an Arabic word for private place of worship e.g. where Mary used to
pray privately in Jerusalem. Or where David used to meditate. Normally
the place for prostrating in this Mihrab is a curved niche within the
thick walls to allow for the lowering of the head in worship. Eyebrows
are often used in Sufi poems as that curve within which the man bows
into prostration so that the Lord may see him.
©
2004-2002, Dara O. Shayda
Calligraphy by Fateh Ezzatpour.
