Daily Times

The clap of thunder

and jagged silence

hails

the sun-flaked swarm

riding high

in amomentary calm

of synthetic awe.

To witness emotions

drilled in Time

and fossilized

like the

luminous eyes of the

loved ones

now gone gently

into the atrophied hunger

of the blackening universe.

All is stilled save

for the ejaculations

of a wounded victim

to the sheets

of age and lust.

but Minerva flaps

in startled

sheen of exit.

Ganesh crows

and all the wakings

of the lidless Buddha

cry ‘enough’ for

Mullah Nasruddin

still deceiving the clowns.

While the hirsute harlot

haggles in a spate

of syncopated areca

and the coleopteral

bureaucrat hums

of the inanities of

movement I bear

witness to the charivari

of man’s folly in

sinking grace and

silent head.

I asked

‘what is in life?’

the hag cackled, the

bureaucrat continued

with his humming

with bated breath

wheezing now

Minerva froze in flight.

The toothless sycophants

chanted in glabrous halitosis

in the unison born of

discalced despair

‘Fihi Ma Fihi’.

The writer is the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies, School of International Service, American University, Washington, DC