Other Voices Magazine

The Monthlies

Winner July 2010

“I used to think freedom meant doing whatever you want. It means knowing who you are, what you are supposed to be doing on this earth, and then simply doing it.” – Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones

1979 lunar meditation
Doyali Farah Islam

oppressed by a round of red,
it is a rectangular green rice crop, cultivated and harvested
by the courage of 100 million spines.

from the age of nine,
I wondered if that central circle on bangladesh’s flag was a
bindi marking a treasured tirtha at the flowing brow of a newly-wed; or the
blood-pool from a dark servant girl’s index, pricked whilst mending a frayed hijāb; or a silken
muleta towards which a starving bullock with 1.5 million bodies on its back could charge to its death, in a final effort to channel its rage.

that was 1974.

now, as an adolescent in the promised land,
the white st. albert sky looks down on me.

at night, when it permits my upward gaze towards dreams,
I see a harvest moon. … could my old flag have represented this?

here, the existence of such a moon is ironic:
an unpeelable lychee, veiled in alizarin red,
that leaves our sun-browned work-hands incapacitated,
left to puzzle over what to do.

seeing it, i long for the regular full moon’s return –
esculent, toothsome; that moonshine wafts ambrosial
and makes me salivate for reapable Possibility.

after our evening recitations, amma says
in a voice as warm as her motherly blood
that the harvest moon is good for us – a reminder
of what is not within reach, and a spiritual lesson in mindfulness.

but in my naiveté, i prefer the active voluptuoisity
of the creamy nude lychee,
that perfect pearl shucked from its shell – bare,
adored and wanted by all, freed
from the confines and constraints of its former location.

that moon seems full of Promise: with my brown fingers
i can reach up and harvest it from the sky.

… la lune, la lune; I begin to learn french here.

when i grow up, i will capture la lune,
like ti-jean living out Canadian fairytales,
and string it onto my tasbih –
a memento of the Attainable God.

or maybe, since i am new in this country,
i will forget that worn dhikr practice, will toss away
those shiny beads tumbled in dawn’s nectar by my attentive fingers,
and swallow the full-moon lychee whole – a eucharist to chart my insides
and deliver to my foreign tissues a message
of what salvation lies here,
with the sacrifice of body and blood.
____________________________________________________________________
tirtha: location with mystical connotations in Hinduism.
muleta: red cape used by a matador to kill a bull.
starving bullock with 1.5 million bodies on it’s back: reference to the 1974 famine in Bangladesh.
mindfulness: a practice based on Buddhist principles of simply observing one’s inner state(s) of being, as opposed to outwardly doing.
tasbih: a string of 100 beads used in Islamic rituals, for example, on which to recite the 99 names of Allah.
dhikr: Islamic practice of Divine remembrance.

Doyali Farah Islam is an undergraduate student of Equity Studies and Near/Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto. Her poem “Spiral Away” was published in the 2004 Hart House Review.

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