Rabia and the Thief
I imagine her here, in some quantum future,
her summers in hedgerows, winters in a corrugated shed
where she plays cards with God, who cheats, of course,
or plaits her hair, uncombed for centuries. She asks him
for a love that is out of this world and he replies
her soul is too old for trinkets. She does not lament
the garden of Eden, that sweet homeland between
the Tigris and Euphrates, once heavy with angels.
But prays for the whole earth to wake from pain,
to forgo its journeys to the black box of the Kaaba,
the crosses and synagogues, asanas of yoga,
all that greed for the milk and honey of heaven.
Nor does she grieve at the loss of her beauty,
but welcomes the truth of what she will become,
lets herself be scoured by that longing for union
when she will take between her hands the much-loved
face on which the seven worlds are written, marry
that silence whose love leaves all words behind.
I think of her most when it’s hot at night and I open
the window, remember the thief who climbed
over the sill into her sparse bedroom. Would I do
what she did? Recognise the smell of ocean,
know the man as another creature out of water,
hair braided with kelp and badderlocks?
And, before he can snatch my blanket, fold
every piece of bedding, each last cotton sheet,
hand them to him like a dowry?
After the Door Has Opened
Here, in San Jan Mohammad Street,
dwells she who is no longer she,
whose desire is gone, who waits
for what is already done.
She is Hafizah –
one who has learned the Quran by heart.
She has visited the black box at Mecca,
kissed the stone of the Kaaba,
but she chooses the holy slums of Pune,
where hunger shrivels in unshaded heat.
Women break at her feet their coconuts of prayer,
make their supplications for babies.
But she knows the gift of sorrow –
how we may learn to squeeze sugar
out of grief.
She knows walking is always backwards,
the best living a kind of erasure –
each day rubbing out the folly of what went before;
how the greatest millstone of pain
cannot grind the grain of you small enough,
the finest sieve will not make you pure.
Her hair is the white of egrets.
Her face Gulrukh – like a rose.
And since the time her life opened
onto the fire that gives God his heat,
she knows the deceit of daylight.
So what if she was Rabia of Basra,
who wrote pleasure in the sand?
She would rather be despised as the thief
who climbed in to steal her final blanket.
Even the best poems should not be worshipped,
but hung out like rags. Words must buckle
at the knees.
Yes, here, in San Jan Mohammad Street,
trades a stall-keeper from whom few want to buy.
Her age – a hundred or more –
small matter as she sits
under the angel of the neem tree –
seven centuries between each feather.
A Piece of Cloth
Where will the lashes fall? On the shoulders, or the ribs?
Who will lift her when she sinks to the floor? What lakes
will catch her blood? Has she been too proud of her back,
the way she rode a bike or stayed atop a horse? Has she
been too proud of her husband, children, lawyer’s
credentials? But the Prophet, peace be upon him, surely
knows there are different kinds of pride, false and true,
different kinds of men, false and true. Is not the hijab
a piece of cloth like any other, pegged on washing lines
along with shirts, sheets, pants? Who bid a man wedge
the Quran beneath his armpit to flay this woman’s back
until the blood is a river and the bones laid bare? Surely
the Prophet, peace be upon him, calls upon the angel
Jibril to intervene. Surely the Prophet’s thirteen wives,
mothers of the believers, sing in praise of these beautiful
girls who drape their hijabs on branches of the pomegranate
trees. Surely, they liken the cloths that flutter round
the fruits to uncaged birds trying their wings.
Notes
Rabia of Basra, c. 717-801, a Sufi mystic and poet, was the first woman to become a Muslim saint.
The shrine of Hazrat Babajan, a Muslim ‘Perfect Master’, is in the Char Bawdi district of Pune, India. Until her death in 1931, Babajan spent her last 24 years living here under a neem tree and, in 1913, revealed to Meher Baba his spiritual identity. She was said to be the reincarnation of Rabia of Basra.
In March 2019, Nasrin Sotoudeh, a human rights lawyer in Tehran, was sentenced to 38 years in prison and 148 lashes for defending Iranian women’s right to remove their hijab in public. Under Iranian law, the man doing the flogging should hold under his arm a copy of the Quran.
Reprinted with permission from Love Leans over the Table (Two Rivers Press, 2023)