Wednesday Poem

Grace

Speaker 4
.

Eyes open in the womb. The struggle arrives to turn darkness into light.
Dangling on the wings of
the Phoenix. The creative process begins to turn ugly. Vandalizing and robbing
graves of
child prodigies turning into serious discussions of Mass Murder and the
therapeutic value of
saturday morning shopping sprees. The betrayal of genius is burning at the
stake. The spider
descends. The violence is always there. The web embraces us all. More
insidious than
drugs. More pleasurable than sex. Slightly entangled. Slightly confused. That
possible
criminal element awakens you to the terror and lonliness of running into the
silent pain of
someone else looking to you for answers. Glamorous and well financed pools
of blood
profiling on neighborhood corners while smiling at and tempting the boldest
gangsta rap.

The wealth we squandered on poor excuse and starving lines of poetry
inspired by the
tenderness of your smile healed me, cleansed me of my indifference to the
Holy Scriptures
should have told us something about being chidren of God in all this Madness,
against all
these odds of too intense and too delicate to be real lovers in real times. The
wind, the water,
the waves so natural in our hands. Falling on notes and images forever
caressing the Full
Moon and laughter too strong to be forgotten on opening nights and wanting
to be a big hit.
Run… Run… Run… to the birth, to the growth, to the experience of harmony so
wise and
peaceful desires to go back to the beginning and try to be good to yourself and
others… are
searching too!

by Umar Bin Hassan
from Poetry International, 2006