Filigreed in Gold

Stretching out the Ramadan vibes + the Ecstatic Poetry Prize live gathering

FEATHER

In a fasting daze
I wander inside from the garden looking for a bag
to take out mould-spangled branches pruned
from the orange tree, get distracted by the laundry
start hunting for string to make a new clothesline
end up digging out a crimson paint-splashed
copy of The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran.
I scrape off the grey crunchy dust along the top
flip through it for gems about love and stuff
go to put away eggs and see a downy brown

feather

and feel its antennae lightness shiver through me
turn briefly into something so air-soft it almost
can’t be touched. Maheen: a trifle. Worthless
like the water that sows a child. Dust-borne.
The body separated into its trillions of particles
momentarily, suspended as the blink between
the endless-before and the endless-after,

a membrane holding two brines of infinity apart.

I hang up the last towels, a denim jumpsuit inside-out
make wudu, stand sockless by the heater to dry off.
There is a gazelle woven into the throw on the
shed door, a fruit fly tracing its shape on this side
of the window. Was it yesterday that I stood on the
uncut grass, bundle of fennel in my hands, paused
under the avocado tree’s swaying head and thought:
how does anyone pass this by – how do I
pass all this gorgeous aliveness by?

How are feathers only treasures when
filigreed in gold?

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I wanted to share one more poem written during this Ramadan, that didn’t have time to go into my Ramadan is Listening ebook (maybe I’ll add it for a reissue next year). It’s been a bit of a bumpy return to post-Ramadan, Spring reality I have to say, that time bitten out of the year to expand spiritual capacity still reverberating through my daily life like the bet of hangovers.

And I’m realising that there is a natural segue, after all, to the other thing I wanted to share today: the Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore Ecstatic Poetry Prize live gathering tomorrow, in which we’ll meet the judges (Baraka Blue and Sukina Noor) and winners, talk about what ecstatic poetry is, what we were looking for, what we were delighted to find, why we need it like never before. It’s free to join, and you can register here.

This is what Ramadan was for me this year, mostly: an inner ecstasy, like a geode sparkling on the inside, its exterior rough, dry. Famine and feast, held in each hand, one impossible without the other; a daily entering of the cave of Surah al-Kahf, dreamy quiet that repels concerns for everyday matters, lets them resolve themselves.

Yet it was also the second Ramadan running that saw millions of Palestinians held captive in a sadistic killing field, their lives and deaths broadcast to a public benumbed to them, the plaintive cries of Gazans filling feeds and Substack chats. Please, help us live. Please, don’t scroll past.

Imagine having to be a child pleading with strangers for their lives. Encountering some sincere responses, but an awful lot of indifference.

As for free speech being hijacked, with people abducted by ICE simply for disagreeing with American foreign policies, fear of speaking up and out will only tyrannies us more and more.

What’s the solution? More and more, I have to remind myself, it’s to speak scared. Inside this fear, this discomfort, is the key to freedom – if not in a worldly sense, then at least in a personal sense. That even if I feel impotent to change the world that seems to be collapsing, this inner terrain is the place I choose to plant my sapling. A small, quiet defiance against hopelessness.

Speak, aloud and beneath your tongue, the beauty and the outrage one carried in each hand. And in between, an ecstasy.