To another Karbala

14 February 2025

These edges, squared and stacked, are not for me,
your pyramids, your regimented rites!
The monuments beneath which lie the bones
of virgins, hundreds, thousands in the blood
which sanctified your ‘new world’ to its gods
of gold and greed—I scream, I want no part!
Your Hellenistic hearts love hierarchs,
your three-part souls, philosophers and kings.
Yet not one drop of their blood beats in mine!
My soul is earth, like yours, but I seek fire.
I sin, but long for that lost purity
which burned eternal on my forebears’ hearths—
which knew no matter that it could not touch—
which sprang forth from the words of one unseen,
whose name and tongue are lost to feckless time,
but still is felt. When ‘Ali and his son
at Karbala bared to their killers’ steel
their living flesh, that too, they longed to feel!
Or those who surged on horseback after hares
to shock those of their settled southern kin,
to seek that flame, across the endless steppes,
to whom the wall of stone is no fit bound
to halt the steps of man or horse or sheep!
Ya ‘Ali! Ya Husayn! You aren’t my kin,
nor is the troth which you confess my own,
but still the fire I glimpsed on Alatau,
and yet again on Baotou’s frozen streets
must be the one which shone in you at last.
Ya Allah! Let my spear be tipped with red,
and if it must be painted with my chest,
the more let me to thee lift up my praise,
for not to one man on this earth I bow!