Conversations with a Saint
Shortlisted for The Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore Ecstatic Poetry Prize 2025
While my website is being redesigned and revamped, and somehow there are 25 subscribers here without any effort of my own, I might as well start posting.
Lote Tree Press, the organisers of the Poetry Prize, said they had over 500 submissions that they couldn’t just select a top 3 but a Highly Commended and a Shortlisted list as well.
I’m grateful that my poem “Conversations with a Saint” was selected.
I have way too many things to share–frustrations and grief over my country’s abiding racism and wayang-ness which will only increase as election season comes upon us, bearing witness to a genocide and atrocities still being committed with impunity, and seeing the global decline to fascism–but I will start with this poem.
Perhaps the rest of the words will come after.
Conversations with a Saint
I After a long train ride past rolling hills and peaceful streams where I saw cows and foxes and lots and lots of sheep sleeping and grazing hopping and living I became greatly distressed! And went crying to the saint, “Can you imagine if I was a sheep?! Where would my 4 hoofs and hocks and knees go in sujud? My tajweed lessons - all gone to waste! My tongue can only go “Baa!” And on Eid al-Adha Oh my God!” “My son, slow down and breathe. You’re not a sheep. Go make sujud. And recite the Qur’an. And save money for the sacrifice.” More distressed than before, “Son? Can’t he see I’m clearly a woman!” II Overcome by regrets over past sins I went to the saint again. He said, “You cannot un-ding a dong but you can always ring-a-ling.” III At sermon today, the scholar said, “Crying over your sins will extinguish the fires of Hell.” I recounted my sins on my walk home, each one bigger than before. In the market, a crowd is laughing hysterically around the saint. I saw familiar faces from the sermon earlier, laughing with tears streaming down their beards “What is this? We’re supposed to be crying over our sins!”, I huffed. The saint said, “We don’t see you crying. Yet all our tears have turned Hell into Surfers’ Paradise.” IV After three hours of heartfelt pouring to the saint, he said, “We think entirely too much and too little of ourselves.” And “I am always waiting to be deliriously surprised by God instead of anticipating being violently disappointed by life.” V I wish I could un-ding this dong But I can only ring-a-ling
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This was a really fun poem to read. The humor was nicely written with rhyme. And as a whole, the poem reads as an old parable you might find in some sufi-esque book.