Ishq Allah

 

You taught me your hungry language: Ishq Allah Ma'bud Allah, “the Lord is love, lover, and beloved!”

I know it now, God's native tongue, though my grammar is confused. The pronouns bewilder me because I have fallen into the flower of your wound, whose petals are Mine, Yours, His, Hers, Ours.

A groundless falling, a ravenous exchange of lips and silences, gazes of Otherness in a single eye, Ishq Allah Ma'bud Allah! All that matters is the wave nature of the moon, the secret kiss of the bee in the pistil of the hyacinth.

All that matters is the sexual caress of listener and stillness, a tremor where the music is conceived. The blue note in your flute has become my sky. I taste the death of distances.

In the star-swirled center of my forehead, you drown your dark embryo. We are reborn as drops in each other’s eyes. Healing, like a bellows, is the gift of hollowness.

Is your desert night above, or deep inside, where the constellations arrange themselves so tenderly, in the shape of a hand over my slumbering face? You flowing in, I flowing out, ebbing into the diamond blackness that is always awake.

Some imagine comets and suns to be out there, beyond us. But they are my tears, caught in the silken web of your longing for me. My inhalation is the pilgrimage to a temple nearer than stillness. My exhalation carries us, together, across the void.

One stirs my buried seed, the other, ah, releases sap, bathing the earth in a bittersweet liquid prayer. I have wounded my diaphragm with this invitation: Come fill me, empty me, drown me in the silence of your Name.

Ishq Allah Ma'bud Allah. O stranger, pilgrim, seeker of lethal cleansing transformations, wield your breath wisely, for it is a burning sword of love!


Vintage book cover, Rubaiyat of Omar Kaiyyam