18 Ramadan
In the daytime, the bus driver says, talking into a mic or maybe talking to himself, that whether he fasts or not his life is still the same old shit. The birds sing louder each morning into the green emergence of spring and thirsty blue eternity. The hunger inside of each of us is an aria of a million colors. The billions cover themselves in feathers of prayer louder than all the blues ever sung along the Mississippi or the Nile. The buses will arrive in front of houses, but no one can go home in this life. At the oncology hospital, families will make small talk about foodstuffs some there have no stomach to eat. We hunger for hunger, finally. The fast goes slowly. The hours are decades, life drips like puss into death. Bus drivers and grave diggers can joke because at work the clock moves slowly, and anyway to die on the job is heroic to the cowardly. Technology has eased suffering so that checking the baseball scores in America and counting the war dead in Ukraine are part of the morning routine now. There are so many to talk to sitting alone in the dark in the wee hours of the morning waiting for the call to prayer. The birds, the dead, the angels—springtime is a conversation. Praise is mandatory because hunger brings us all to our knees. Supplication is like shaking mercy from a great tree so tall the fruit is high up in the branches and obscured by light.
Thank you for sharing this. It brings a wonderful insight into the daily life of those who are fasting. I like that very much. Plus, it's very well written.