the shadowsaint

what if our gods are of our own making

Rabi’a al-Basri (c. 717-801 CE) is one of the most beloved Sufi mystics. Born in Basra, Iraq, she was shortly thereafter sold into slavery. She was freed by her master and, after a brief flute-playing career, spent the rest of her life as a celibate ascetic in the desert. She lived in great poverty and dedicated herself wholly to worship and writing. 

The Shadowsaint poems are part of a larger series, of different people reckoning with the formidable figure of Rabi‘a: scholar of Islamic history, a girl who finds a book of Rabi’a’s poetry in a shack in Tennessee, and, here, the Shadowsaint, a polar-opposite reflection of Rabi’a. 

1.

—O strange twin
o tethered sister—
There are those who 
tire of this world
born with compass eyes
bodies that rasp like cotton
feeding on light
ill of corpse.

This is you but not me.

My bones kiss the earth
where your tears drown it
and my eyes do not grieve
to open in the morning.
I pity you as you would 
pity me if you knew 
I existed.

2.

Each leap you make toward light
I collapse in dark.
You did not think the world
would not react equally 
when you pulled away?

My land knows yours but not yours mine
so we are the shadows, the tricksters.
No devil, only us, and every trap
we lay is a desperate yank at the rope.
We hope you’ll fall so we can fly.

On our streets we know not whether to honor
more the prince or the dung-picker, for
behind every king in my world is a beggar 
in yours, and beneath every beggar a king.
And because we are uncertain, we honor both.

3.

Your beneficent god has
racked you with illness and hunger
while I plumply taste him in honey 
I lick from my fingers.

O Rabi‘a, what if our gods 
are of our own making?
And you have built yours 
of harsh brightness, fed him
breath with your prayers, by
faith drew his outline; you
dare him to tear at your body, so
he complies with disease; you
say the world pales against him
and he drains its colors for your eyes.

Do you doubt yourself so much
you fear you’ll abandon
for a song, a lip, a fig?

When you thought of dates
you denied them to yourself.
When I thought of dates
I stuffed myself full until I 
could not eat another and 
studied the last of them in
its leather beggar’s coat.

Your choice may have been 
the more admirable
but which of us knows
the sweetness 
the anatomy of the date?

And surely god creates
everything for a purpose?

.

The Shadowsaint (Part 2)

Depiction of Rab’ia al-Basri grinding grain from a Persian dictionary, date unknown.

All other images by Antigone Kourakou.