As of sundown yesterday, Muslims began the 30-day celebration of Ramadan. During this month, they fast between dawn and dusk, reflect on their spiritual life, pray and join together for pre-dawn and evening meals. The evening meal, iftar, on the final night is a proper blow-out, as you might imagine.
Ramadan actually moves
according to the lunar calendar, which means that some years the daily fast (no
food and no water) is more than 12 hours. That’s tough, but I imagine that it
can help to focus the reflection.
Today’s entry for National
Poetry Month is by Kazim Ali, a writer and professor of literature and creative
writing at UC San Diego.
“Ramadan”
You
wanted to be so hungry, you would break into branches,
and have to choose between the starving month’s
nineteenth,
twenty-first, and twenty-third evenings.
The liturgy begins to echo itself and why does it matter?
If
the ground-water is too scarce one can stretch nets
into the air and harvest the fog.
Hunger
opens you to illiteracy,
thirst makes clear the starving pattern,
the
thick night is so quiet, the spinning spider pauses,
the angel stops whispering for a moment—
The
secret night could already be over,
you will have to listen very carefully—
You
are never going to know which night’s mouth is sacredly reciting
and which night’s recitation is secretly mere wind—
