shidah

destruction,
i see, is how they've mended that
city in the distant blown-up country,
and i think how the sons of abraham
have all made a mess of it and his
daughters are left weeping

i once embraced, with gaiety and without
shame, my brother, who came to live with
us when we both were greater idealists

the muslim and the christian by
the faith of our fathers,
but to hell with that on this day
just for a moment

i must remember that we've all
been fed broken conventions
but were born with the perfect
blood of adam

that what is instilled in us
is opposed to what is born
and what is collected in
time crashes against what is
there at birth

i do not deny the greatness
of certain men, but
i question the truth in any
assertions of superiority

i recall weeping on the day
my brother caught a bus to the airport,
to fly home to his distant asian
country, because he'd impacted me

but from then on we wandered separately
in our own wildernesses,
marrying and making children
in these sheltered, assigned orbits

as the world saw the collisions
of faiths and nations; peoples
in villages perished and history
folded upon itself as it always has

but in our time together we despaired
not once about our wilting differences,
our encouraged ignorance,
but loved instead, for being alive
and full of the ferocity of youth

yet today i think my brother
will agree with me that we're all to blame
for the current calamity, all of us except
shidah and her sisters

the sisters of indra, of confucius, of
lao tzu;

the sisters of the tanakh, the bible,
and the qur'an

the sisters of the primal faiths:
of the maori, of the sioux, of the bushongo,
of the pygmy, and the dayak too;

the sisters of the mythologies of the norse
and celts; the slavs and the greeks

i see them all in the face of shidah,
my brother's wife, star of the malaysian sky,
her eyes the color of the melanistic wolf,
her smile as wide as the deserts across
which our prophets once wandered

in her is the seed of the beginning,
the coursing of the begotten,
the horizons of the generations and the
origins of the spark of truth

i'd rather see her rule, and her sisters
too; and i would see the world of
men know peace at once

for i believe the answers are in the
arms of our mothers, not in the arms of
men

that rules and laws, faiths and borders,
are the constructs of the self-appointed
while the members of our race who nurture
are the true keys to the gates of heaven

my own tribe will dine on these words
of course; make a meal of my
naivete, spitting out my bones
into a chalice made of earthen clay.

after all, what am i, but a small poet in a
village of inert souls who march along
in a cold country going colder on this snowy day

i'm a recipient of good fortune,
to be sure, but the only currency i have to
make change with is word after word

and we all know that the heaviest of words
possess no weight in the hands of
those who hold the scales of power

so i plea to shidah and to her
daughters, her sisters and their
daughters: assume your thrones
and cast out the usurpers and fools

for once claim and use at will, to
correct the blunders of men, what your god
has imbued in you by nature:
the power and the joy of
creation