allahu.cipher

The flames are extinguished at last
Still I smell the smoldering remnants
Of a nine hundred ninety one year quest
All of those journeys, all of that time
Now like the fading echo of his voice
Sheikh Shams, the too-bright sun shining
Across centuries, a mischievous trickster
Chant this dhikr, he said, it will teach you
The long-sought secret of life and death
I thought it would come to me all at once
But no, I felt nothing, no insight came
Instead the litany blocked from me gray age
Trapped in this dungeon never to die
I’ve sifted through these remnants of it
The sticky residue of the time and travel
Hoarded here in this humble house
The tongues of flame spared nothing
So many books burned to blackened cinders
Irreplaceable, never published, gathered
From saints and sages forgotten or never known
Jars of exotic insects from every corner
Of the globe, fabulous colors and black orbs,
Those mysterious eyes of impossible depth
Alien appendages of my brothers and sisters
Reaching out into cloudy formaldehyde
And the shattered glossy purple urn
Her ashes spilled, commingling with ash
In undifferentiated heaps and blowing
Around and around in pointless whirlwinds
Purple was her favorite color she told me
On the harvest day, between the two rivers
And then she turned to dust and I kept living
Witness to a million births and deaths
People and nations, conceived and born
Rising to strut on mountainpeaks of youth
Then sliding down to the valley of decrepitude
Kicking and screaming into the maw of death
The same dark land where all these memories fled
All of it is gone, all except my bones
This skeleton-witness remains to hear
The last reverberation of that blessed formula
In the void between these ribs at last
The secret swirling in a whisper: absence.