I make this dedication to all our mothers and fathers,
brothers and sisters in Pakistan
and to all those who have suffered
from the October 2005 earthquake.
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The rain falls on your battered bruised bodies Washing away
Caked blood stains
Evaporated salt tears
Opening rivers of blood
Exposing bruises

Barely breathing
Alone, with death
I turn to you

In this land of no hope
A bleak future and tumultuous chaos
Your blazing eyes
Burn me
Responding fiercely to
My question of salvation
"Inshallah"

In this dark,
The vigor of your trembling tenebrous body
Eludes a fortitudinous spirit
That spans this ruined Muslim nation
Upheld only by 5 letters
Conjoined with mighty words
That give hope to those who chose to believe

I break at the pressure of your cracked innocence
Cuts like sharp steel tears
Upon a hedonistic body to whom
Necessity is a life-source
And uncertainty
Unfathomable

I am sorry that you have to be ruined by
The treacherous actions
Of a liberated superfluous minority
Leading, but themselves led by the nose
To whom faith is a token
They flung into their wishing well

Where sins are sold
You seek to repair
With a grain of dirt molded
By your callused bloody hands

I understand

Honest blood can now (re)build a (the) country into rock

Your tears are the cement
Your hearts the lines of bricks
And your voices the driving power

I had ceased to believe in your word
Second-guessed
The light in your eyes

It is divine power you derived
From ancient sacred words that
Molded your body
Into vessels
Of action and truth

Beams of light from the strength of your religion

And spilling faith from the passion in your heart

I underestimated the power of  "…Inshallah"?

Inshallah we can make
The intention
And have the Lord lead us to its completion

Divine Guidance has eased our way
Into this ocean of hands
Trembling with the anticipation
To aid and solidify Islam

All in the Power of Inshallah

A box of oils. A hand-stretched canvas. Green,
in the hue of mint: the night's steeping impasse
before Khalil put his brush down- they split
his handle into 4 pillars. Imploded locks
splintered rubies. The prolonged tremble of oolong
and the ghosts of boot prints.  The city whose imprint fades
in the painting that dropped from the prayer room wall
in his house.  They can't take the 5th. They can take what he painted, but they can't take what he can still paint.

He could paint their eyes how he saw them-
parochial red, peerless, confused boys and their leaders-
narrow, parental and devolved from equity, but Khalil
never tried to compete with Paradise. He never painted
them- the men of entitlement.  Their black-eye delivery-
his relative wealth, next to soldiers pitching tents in the desert;
their green eyes scanning for glory.  They can't take his prayers;
any of them.

Shinkay's silhouette.  Arabesque hair.   Her kesh dress.
Complexity unto which she gave herself.  Why had she married him?  
Pickled tang of his green olive bread. Contour of olive branches
he stretched in graphite across the synagogue, church and masjid
of the Holy Land sky-scape.  No matter that she had never been there.  
Together they had made lush vegetable gardens; sheen
beyond spring and producing a spectrum
of love's accomplishments.

Her last night they lived like animals- watched each other
through the flare of grenades pirouetting
to a blared sound track from a tank.
Her brown topaz eyes in the wrong light used to look green. Brass and copper
turn green with age.  Subjects avoid light.  
Blind contour drawing.  Shinkay- fading from infrared detection.  
Khalil as he sees her encased in shadow, and so he paints her shadow.   
They can take his Qur'an, and paint it with their yellow, but they can't take The Qur'an away.

Khalil doesn't know how long
her body waited before he could bury her
but he could count the time in color.
After black shrapnel dispersed.
After the rose of seven Maghrib salah.  
After the color of it drained from her
skin to mineral lime.  Blood in her
veins looked green until they cut her.

Paint dies.  Khalil knows this.  
If the ocean were ink,
if the ocean were ink,
if the ocean were ink.  

Naive armies try to compete
with the green of Paradise.  
They try to paint the dying world
in victory colors, but the paint cracks and chips.

Serpentine jade of a ruler's palace. Emerald city flakes.  
Living in the United States is easy.  Boxed crates branded on a barge.  Broken
wood on the sandy grand opening.  It's like riding on a lion's back
as it hunts down a gazelle, and Khalil is a young gazelle watching the mother of his children die.

The only thing green in this city are the golf courses.
A woman cocks her wrist, dangles her painted fingernails
over the passenger sill of a matching forest-green Mercedes.
Colors have speed. Orange speed cones
line the streets for the reckless, with the red cones of the eye, he can see green.

Purple hearts with oak-leaf-cluster pound
in the chests of tin men.  Bronze stars can't light up the sky forever.   
They can't take The One, but one day, unlike they have taken Shinkay,  they will all be taken; xanh like the leaves.