HAFIZ & THE HORSEMEN

Their horses tethered to an iron ring,
four gamblers toss
the fingerbones of children
in a valley where shale
keeps seeds from shedding their husks.

The one with diseased eyes
turns to look at Hafiz
and with a gesture
offers the poet a turn
in theur groteque game of chance.

Hafiz instead questions death,
"You, the eventual leveller
who places your cold hand
on every shoulder,
why ride with these other three?

With famine laughing at
peanut butter tossed into minefields?
With pestilence grinning,
medicine being blown to sawdust?
War and his cruel jokes?

Death says nothing,
rattles the dice in its hand,
puts them back into a shabby pocket
as the horsemen rise like dust
into their saddles and ride off.

HAFIZ SPEAKS OF PERISHABLE THINGS

Mine is a cavalcade of glimpses,
simple domestic objects and activities
whose angles reflect a hidden light;
whose repetition bears witness
to the eternity of the immediate
in all perishable things.

Mine is a singing of silences,
those melodies of emptiness
in a sky scrubbed clean by thunder,
in a lake lying under ice;
where transparency makes plain
life's indivisible abundance.

Mine is a garbled communion
of invisible hymns, inaudible epiphanies
that spiral in the sun like dust;
that cascade through time and work
with the inexhaustible grace
of thawing liquids thirsting to find salt.

And when murder arrives,
whether it is with a limp and a sword,
or rises out of a book of light,
what use is my singing, or my seeing
the miraculous in the commonplace?
I exclaim. I cannot resurrect the dead.

When ash fills this tongue,
all my hymns to the Friend are drowned out
by the buzzing of flies
and the awful silence of rotting bodies.
Can I pour love upon oblivion's meal
like yogurt sauce up
on spiced lamb?

HAFIZ NEAR SLEEP

This arid cot—
a dry moon in a sky
alive with industrial revenge…

Beneath a jagged massif—
headstones of the anonymous dead.
Unknown names etched in ice and blood,
carved by sudden noise…

Dreaming without rain—
dice in the dirt,
skulls in the dust,
the jolt of suicidal trajectories,
a skyline with missing teeth…

Khidir's indelible phrases
standing in memory's canyon,
his prophecies and enigmas.
The shifting shape of revelation
in his gestures,
his evasions, his silences.

Embedded in that recollection
a fable out of the Whirlwind:
we all pass through parables
in that journey of finding
ourselves through ourselves.

Each of us carries a story
resonant with our particular life:
Cinderella or Gilgamesh,
the resurrection,
the return of the prodigal son.
It is the one voice we listen to
in the small hours of our longing.

© Tom Neale