Awaken!
Awaken! Awaken!
The night has passed awaken!
Disgusted! Disgusted!
With your Self be disgusted!
In our Egypt today
A moron is selling the Joseph [1]
Believe me not!
Go to bazaar and see with your
own eyes.
The Nonpareil One leaves you
no choice
Blooming the rose upon your
face [2]
Pulling the thorns out of your
hands
Then rush towards the gardens
rushed.
Heed not to every deception
and delusion
Why cleansing blood with
spilled blood [3]
Thus be fallen like a crystal
goblet
Shattered be, lowly and
destitute.
Upon the round swing of its
Polo mallet
Be the ball! Be the ball!
Because of arrows in its quiver
Roll over dead! Roll over
dead! [4]
There came the call sounding
the heavens
Then came the healer for all
lovers
Yearning for It to come to
you?
Become ill! Become ill! [5]
Likeness of a cave is this
bosom
Private chambers of Beloved
If you are the companion of
the cave [6]
Rush into! Rush into!
You are a fine but naïve
man
Offering the gold to a thief
Want to recognize the robbers?
Be a bandit! Be a bandit! [7]
Silent is the description of
this sea
Buoy wordless within Its ocean
[8]
Want to learn how to dive the
depth?
Grow fins! Grow fins!
End.
Rains upon the streets of Port
Au Prince, the iridescent
sable pearls of Paradise. Streets that follow like a tedious argument [9], but
this day glitters like a majestic throne, embroidered by the child
slave’s
tearless eyes. Pearls strewn by the meandering walkways of Cite Soleil,
the
regal necklace entrusted to the treasury of Heavens.
Awaken! Awaken! That the
Sultan of Love at a moment’s notice
shall demand pearls of this necklace, though foolishly you thought no
account
was kept and reckoning never.
Alas this day! The moron sold
the pearls for few worthless coins, like the Joseph in
Pharaoh’s Egypt. And if you believe me not, look upon the mirrors of
their
faces. A moment manufactured by distant relics of millions of silent
Creole
moans, thunders sounding the Heavens and skies of Haiti welded together
without
joints but by the child slave’s gazes upon the Beloved: The Sultan
presiding
upon every shattered heart…
An ocean filled with copious
pearls, bijouterie sufficing a
thousand imperial thrones. And I am tormented upon the smoldering
flames of
amnesia, my screams in depth of migraine-dusted dreams shattering the
crystal
goblet brimful with the false-panacea of my Self, the poison sufficing
the
murder of a thousand nations.
I ride the dolphins of Haitian
slave’s eyes diving the depth
of that shore-less sea, the sanctuary for all wordless love exchanges,
that I
might die this day and for the last time forgotten and my last breath
this scream:
Arc of your eyebrow
Bow to my violent arrow
Ripping devil’s heart apart
Potent ruse fallen
Scribbling pen the arrow
Triumphant archer
Obliterating battles
Goliath slaughtered
Unbreakable chains
Enslaving this David
Blackness of your svelte arms
Emancipating bondage
Let this hawk
Fly fast
Fly high
Nesting at the lofty corners
Of your Asian-Caribbean eyes
Shangri-la High
Let this dolphin
Dive fast
Dive deep
Drowning in vexed waves
Of your deadened eyes
Atlantis at dusk
[1] Prophet Joseph was saved from the well where his
brothers abandoned him. And then he was sold as a slave for a little
bit of
money. This was one of the greatest prophets of Allah, the future king
of Egypt
that saved the lives of millions of people from famine, and was sold
for few
little coins. Koran [12:20] :
“In our Egypt today” means in
our life now and the moron is
ourselves. This moron selling the Joseph i.e. the jewel deep within our
essence
capable of loving the Creator, for few coins sold as a slave to the
Self. Rumi says
if you do not believe me go check it out in the market i.e. look at
yourself.
[2] The
"Nonpareil One" is the God and it makes decisions for
us seemingly leaving no choices for us and often this makes us angry
and our
faces become red like a rose. Rumi says this is like Beloved removing
the
thorns of this rose out of hands prior to us reaching the final garden.
So the anger is the pain of
pulling the thorns out of your
hands, your own thorns, so that you will be prepared to go into Gardens
of
Eden thorn-less.
[3] Don’t
be fooled by wars and other acts of violence and
corruption. If you are fooled and attack back, then it is like washing
blood
with blood nothing will be cleansed. It is better to be shattered like
the
goblet that could hold the blood, but instead be empty and throw
yourself lowly on
the ground and endure the pain to shatter.
If you are shattered you can no hold hate within.
[4] This world is like a Polo player. It hits you with
its
mallet then be a round ball and shoot far far away from it!!! It has
arrows
looking for a game to hunt, then drop dead so it will not hit you with
arrows.
[5] Get
sick with ailment of heartache so the healer of hearts
has a reason to come to you. If you do not have Its pain in your heart,
frolic
with Self and loving this world, then there is no reason for the healer
to come
you.
[6] The
companion of the cave is from Koran[9:40]
referring
to Abu-Bakr the Companion of the Prophet. When the Prophet escaped
Makkah from
the tyranny of pagan Arabs towards Madina, Abu-Bakr was with him. And
there was
a moment they were almost captured. But the Prophet led him to the cave
and
said to him ‘fear not! Allah is with us’. The spiders rushed to the
door of the
cave and spread it with their webs so that the pagans did not enter the
cave
thinking no way someone could go in living the webs undisturbed.
This heart of ours is like
that cave, where the Beloved can
be found soothing us consoling us and healing us. So like Abu-Bakr then
go rushing into
this cave.
[7] Deep
within our essence we are innocent and naïve.
Therefore our Self the thief fools us and our essence innocently gives
into
this thief. We lose our innocence, truthfulness, and kindness… Rumi
says if you
do not wish to be cheated by this thief you need to know your Self and
think
like this thief so you will not give up the jewels of the essence.
[8] Words
describe our experiences. Words are not those
experiences! Just a script empowering others vicariously to share our
experiences. There are some experiences between the creation and the
Creator,
which are impossible to fully explicate in words. Perhaps partial
renditions like these
poems of Rumi but the complete experience is like an ocean. There are
no words!
No one says anything. Be a fish, grow fins and swim to the depth of
this sea
silently.
[9] T.S.Eliot
Background: Haitian Child
Slavery :
To survive, young forced
into servitude
23 novembre 2003
The Seattle Times
To survive, young forced into
servitude
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -
Describing the beating that drove her to the
streets, Madeleine Vilma spoke
as if she deserved it. "I made them mad at
me," the skinny 15-year-old
recalls of the two women who had paid a pittance
for her six years ago and then
put her to work as a maid. "I broke the heel
off my shoe, so they beat me
with their sandals."
Dispatched to the slums of the
Haitian capital when she was 9 by parents
unable to feed her, Madeleine
had been delivered by a trader into a life of
unpaid domestic servitude in
exchange for food and shelter. Like an
estimated 300,000 other
children in this poorest of Western countries, she
had no alternative except
homelessness and hunger.
The children, called
"restaveks" - from the French "rester avec," to stay
with - are not servants of the
wealthy but of those just slightly less poor
than the parents who sent them
here.
As Haiti slips further into
extreme poverty each year, the wave of
children - some as young as 4
- flocking to the cities has become a deluge,
forcing most to settle for
whatever offer of shelter is at hand. Children
who are not brokered go
door-to-door looking for a place to stay.
"Most of these patrons want
someone they can have do anything they need done
without the conditions that
come with employing an adult domestic," said the
Rev. Pierre St. Vistal, who
runs a mission that houses 45 children and feeds
hundreds of others. "With
kids, there are no limits. They have no rights and
can be made to do anything."
Restaveks first appeared in
the capital in the 1920s and '30s, when wealthy
families, as "an act of
solidarity" with the rural poor, offered shelter and
education in exchange for
domestic labor.
But as the gap between rich
and poor widened drastically in recent decades,
ragged children coming from
the countryside became so numerous that they
were forced to work for anyone
able to make the daily pot of beans and rice
go one mouth further.
"The wealthy families don't
want to get involved anymore. They say this is a
form of slavery, and they
don't want to be associated with it," says Wenes
Jeanty, who runs a charity
that helps the children. "That has left the
children to the poor and less
educated in the cities."
For most restaveks growing up
far away from their families, there is no
caring soul to help them.
"The households that take
these kids in see them as chattel," says Merrie
Archer, director of
human-rights programs for the National Coalition for
Haitian Rights.
"Often their own parents see
them as chattel, as a means of getting support
for themselves once the kids
get work in the city."
Few ever escape their
indentured servitude to find paying jobs.
People trying to help Haiti's
enslaved children scoff at the government's
claims that it is addressing
the problem. "There has been a law against
child labor for years, but it
has never been enforced," says Jean Lherisson,
head of Haiti Solidarity
International.
Carol J. Williams, Los
Angeles Times
©
2003-2002, Dara Shayda
