Section B:

The Sound that Silence Makes

Mother, I am not meant 

for this. I stand 

in the rain, dumbfounded 

and searching, wiping my self 

from my eyes. No matter 

how still I become, I am still 

spinning. I see my self 

in every thing. Crawling, yawning, 

swimming, digging. Knowing

I have a before, only after.

I have learned this much: the lake 

is a mother. I am 

feathered, buoyant in 

its swell. If you long for time

enough, absence becomes

a kind of presence. Distance 

taut as a line between 

us. No cord is 

broken. My ears carry this 

still beating heart 

like a breath. What we secret in 

these bodies—threaded

prehistory, grooves of 

silence, bone-ridden and

weary, ancient—is 

not called weeping.

Section C: 

I chose the medium of poetry because I wanted to incorporate the arc of understanding or knowledge that is represented in Iqbal’s “The Complaint”—this idea of co-creation between God and humanity. In a more compressed space, and putting pressure on the language I’m employing, I wanted to enact the “radical bridging” of the human soul with that of the divine. This poem, inspired by Iqbal, also takes cues from the nature of revelation in Rumi’s poems (by speaking from, out of, and within silence) and incorporates cross-cultural knowledge that I think compliments the Islamic poetic tradition, specifically Taoist philosophy, as the speaker of the piece makes a return through the vehicle language to the divine source (the Mother) within an imaginitive and liminal/post-colonial poetic realm. It just so happens that the speaker’s mother is also a literal and once-physical mother who was lost to the speaker, and so the devotional poem becomes elegiac in its aims. “Mother, I am not meant / for this. I stand // in the rain, dumbfounded / and searching…” The Sufi aim of carrying forth divine presence in the living body mimics the elegist’s aim of carrying forth ancestral memory in order to commune with the human soul after death in language, and assert its lastingness. As I write in the poem, “If you long for time // enough, absence becomes / a kind of presence.” I’m not as certain about what venue or audience I imagine for this poem, but I think I could see it existing in a sonic or visual medium, spoken or sung, housed in ambient color or music. Many of the images in the poem are drawn from various sea-creatures (specifically sea turtles: their “weeping”/secretion of salt on the shore, their ability to hold breath for long periods of time, the aging that can be seen in the “growth” rings in their bones) so I think having the language “swim” in a kind of sonic rendering would be interesting and fitting. I imagine, then, that the poem could be shared with listeners of music and with musicians, and have a broader and less specific audience. Otherwise, maybe it could share space with the images of a mural? I’m really not too sure.