For you who have huddled beneath
cardboard clouds of cheerless midnight,
your heart pulled taut like a fisherman’s net
overstuffed with creatures of the good,
with creatures of beauty and of neverfading evil,
in honor of you I step through life
as if through a field of sleeping gods
picking from the garden of their dreamers’ bliss
a bouquet of light to color and feed your immortal light.

How long have your words run
like white stallions charged with black lightning
through the desert of my fears and prayers?
And when did the kindness of your voice
seduce and bless the meekness of my voice?
I was born a pilgrim damned by namelessness
and gifted with blindness until you
bathed my heart in a holocaust
of love and a firestorm of vision.

To you who weaned yourself of half-penny passions
and took in your arms the fury of life’s glory
and joy’s betrayals, who held at your breast
the lips of those starving for your death:

To the shattered heart of Jalaluddin Rumi,
   teaching time how to dance and oceans how to weep;
To the trembling hands of Walt Whitman,
   glowing with America and feverish with courage;
To the mystical passion of Jean Toomer,
   black as Africa and blue as eternity;
To the warrior-woman throat of Gwendolyn Brooks,
   sweet horn of plenty still tumbling walls;
To the unchained soul of Pablo Neruda,
   riding hurricanes over despair’s bullshit dictators;
To the JuJu-spirit eyes of James Baldwin
   and the saxophone bones of Billie Holiday;
To the Buddha-child laughter of Jack Kerouac
   and the rose-perfumed miseries of Jean Genet.

To each of you in future hours and present tense
warming the dark with your spiritual naked Self--
worshippers of women and caressers of men,
Beholders of God and guardians of my madness
did I tell you I was born a pilgrim? I was
damned by namelessness and gifted with blindness
until you bathed my heart in a holocaust
of love and a firestorm of vision.

© Aberjhani

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