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Niyyah for Wudu
Do you intend
Go wash your hands
That you intend
Of the smut of self-love
What you intend
Your face of its tarnish
Guidance System
The lookout tower is useless as a lighthouse
And yet the ship makes landfall
On a branch of the light rail that shows the tourists around
It ascends the steps, the dunes, and the embankment
Where a mural is painted of oceanic cryptids
As caryatids. Later, among half-buried pallets
Site of an historic disaster when
The world was bigger and under
A different style of management
Like a dwindling country school except
With fewer enrolments then than now
Rabbits read signals
And thistles extend down to the chainlink fence
That stops the fog coming further inland
My Children Are Older Than Me
Ever heard
Of the Yonaguni Monument?
Well
There is a polyp lives in the abyss
For millennia battening on foul detritus
Until just as a bushfire germinates
A wattle seed, volcanic vents
Erupt and the great migration
Begins, the freakish things purpurescent
In decomposition, beached in bulk
Slimy as boiled okras, the size of men
To be studied by marine biologists
One of whom, a young childless woman
Is found in the midst of a personal crisis
Drawn to the specimen
With more than scientific curiosity
She does the needful thing
Then takes a nap lasting several weeks
On waking she thinks, or would if she was able
My children are older than me
I must obey them
I am thirsty for salt and salt and salt, and death
Cannot be nothingness
If it be the condition for their arising
And even if it be so, so be it!
Thus begins the apocalypse that ends
The Kali-Yuga, darkest of ages
Three Chimneys in a Paddock
The first wore a cartouche charged
With a human face that wore in turn
A sorrowful expression
The second performed a miracle
Whenever it rained
Its hearth would blaze up
The third was an active volcano
Inclusivity
Astride a dark, clear tributary stream
She sat side-saddle
Attendants weaving reeds and flowers
While lounging together on festal barges
In the shape of horses
Horizon so high the aspiring eye
Couldn’t climb the hills to reach it
And in midst of the procession
On elephant back, she danced as if to say
I’m just here to demonstrate
How beauty comes in all shapes and sizes
So let fall your scales from
The highest window!
Further to which the child in her arms
These freckles of mine are to remind you
That other people around the world
Have darker faces. And they expanded
More and more until at length
They filled up all of space, receiving
Worship of all, even
The rain gauge and weather station
Jalal El-Kadali is a Sufi sheikh whose ghazals can be encountered here at Terror House, at Expat Press, and soon at Misery Tourism. Follow him on Twitter here.