Wednesday Night Poem after a Twelve Hour Work Day
Composing on the phone allows me to work in total darkness, after work. I hear the cars and the tramway as background noise. My wife and daughter are eating late dinner at my in-laws'. I have total faith in the mercy and justice of Allah, so no matter if I will go to paradise or burn in hell, I will sleep well tonight.
I have only one heart, so great a heart I have shattered it numerous times. It keeps loving. I am grateful for the times I have not had a job, otherwise I would have spent the rest of my best hours working.
I’ve cleaned hundreds of toilets and washed thousands of dishes. I’ve mowed graves in summer that I dug in winter. I’ve made breakfast, lunch, or dinner for thousands upon thousands. I’ve taught thousands more to speak, read, and write the language of Shakespeare, Mark Twain, and Chinua Achebe. If I burn in hell, it won’t be for this work.
Maybe I will burn in hell for writing poetry. It doesn’t make any money, aside from a few prizes. How many hours have I indulged my own secret language with myself? How many nights have I scribbled it in notebooks? I have lived in a darkness with my truest words for decades. I did not sit in my cave and wait for Gabriel. I listened to the sounds of my heart. I saw what my eyes saw. I smelled all the roses and sucked all the lemons I could. I lay alone in the darkness and think of lemons and roses. I should burn in hell for this, but for the ultimate mercifulness.
The holiest men and women I’ve known worked with their hands. Cooks and repairers. These were the best sheiks. They baked bread or concocted sauces that filled bellies and emptied heads of worries. They mended broken things. They built fences around the vulnerable or put doors on their hinges to connect rooms. They were patient, systematic, and orderly. My other teachers taught me English, which has its uses.
English is a language of sea raiders, barbarians, thieves, marauders, defrauders, and freebooters. That is why it is the language of imperialism, Hollywood, the internet, and Global Civilization and/or Savagery. It was not the language of my most ancient ancestors. Some of their descendants learned it to find a job.