There must’ve been a last Muslim, whom God chose to turn off the lights,
who took for Semitism’s sake a final fumbled step off Spanish soil.
‘Better,’ they said, ‘to love, to lose, and to go, then to linger in Morisco limbo.’
Except what the hell did they know?
Read: God said. But also to write. We are pens; blood is the ink
with which we speak. What do you do when all of your world
turns on all of you?
No hay moros en la costa. Then there were no Moors. Then there was no coast.
Their sails unfurled, wind and distance diminished his old world.
Adhans became whispers, then memories; the courtyards vacant, bankrupt, then weightless photons, the future’s foreordained bosons, in the spaces where you leave your shoes and quantum foam means hope and failure fuse.
He sighed and he cried, the one become the other, not little tears but heaving sobs, in every tear an ocean nine centuries cold till the corsair captain put his hands
on his trembled shoulder to softly scold,
‘Brother, your trauma will sink our ummah!’
He did as he was told, he dried his eyes and saw with dead glaze gaze the parapets of his grandfather’s castles made immodest by unfriendly flags–
though their foreign imam came by with a mirror for this pauper:
‘Brother, there are full mosques and refilled casks, new lives in Sarajevo, or perhaps you’d rather restart in Tripoli or in Alexandria?
This Bahri Jihad might even blast on to Bandar Aceh–’
But this man had business with the one responsible: ‘Take me to Mecca!’
(The Imam cornered the captain: ‘Reis, we owe him this.’)
‘To God’s Home!’ he relented, where months later, worn down and
down, this deportee dashed with a speed he knew not he still had,
to the very door of the Ka‘ba, vocative particle plus definite article:
‘Ya Allah!’ he said. ‘I wish not to go to the future, not any afterlife,
I care neither to return nor to wander any longer,
I demand only to know by what justice, my Lord,
You keep Your home
while You’ve seen fit to drive me from mine?’
The stunned pilgrims spiralled away from this blasphemy,
till there was just one man before just One God. A voice.
Contingent subject. Direct object. Booming
in his (their) heart(s) as much as outside and apart
‘My child,’ and with this alone the clouds prostrated, raining, crying, frightened to the point of dying, letting go as children must
and all the mountains of all the planets like carded wool
and seventy thousand veils of light and dark paused to hear Him descend
where stunned worshippers could stare only dumbstruck to the sky
and Satan sneered He heard that ragged peasant and not I
‘My child,’ He said, ‘can you not see that I have dressed My house in black
because I am in mourning for you?’