Category

Islam

Showing 1-20 of 53 results
Filter Results
  • Poem

    I WANT SKY

    By Bazeed
    In the hiding
    hour of autophagy
    ghosts hang out all day and talk to us.
    An archival haunting demanding tribute:
         half a lime for breakfast every day.
    بشرٌ يئنّونَ من الألمِ
    human voices keening in pain
    تُشعلُ أجسادَهُمَ النارُ
    their bodies, consumed by fire
    light up the...
  • Poem

    poetry-magazine

    From the Sky

    By Sara Abou Rashed
    When I die,
    bury me in the sky—
    no one is fighting over it.

    Children are playing soccer
    with empty bomb shells
    (from the sky I can see them).

    A grandmother is baking
    her Eid makroota and mamoul
    (from the sky I can taste them).

    Teens are writing love...
  • Poem

    poetry-magazine

    Allah Castles

    By Faisal Mohyuddin
    are what my son,
    with a 5-year-old’s

    sweetness, calls every
    house of worship,

    is how I can tell
    he is a traveler too.

    O, how many times
    I’ve performed salah

    in empty churches,
    whispered ameen

    at mass, made wudu
    before holding

    the Torah or the
    Guru Granth Sahib,

    nodded reverently
    at the statue of Ganesh

    in...
  • Poem

    Waiting

    By Noor Naga
    This is a practical religion         there is a prayer at dawn (beginning when it is light enough outside for a black thread to be distinguishable from a white thread and ending at sunrise)         there...
  • Poem

    The Mansion of My Childhood

    By Mo H. Saidi
    I

    My father was tall, plump, old and cruel.
                When he was late returning home, we’d
                            joke that he’d been taken to the morgue.

    A story teller, he often would say,...
  • Poem

    Reciting the Holy Book

    By Mo H. Saidi
    Mother recited the Koran every night.
    None of us knew what those words meant.
    She persuaded us to pray every day.
    She would frighten us,
    “You’ll go to Hell otherwise.”

    Near the mosque I was born.
    Reciting aloud the muezzin kept us
    awake all night. Mother said,...
  • Poem

    poetry-magazine

    salat to be read from right to left

    By Dujie Tahat
                                                                                   ...
  • Poem

    poetry-magazine

    Anima Writes a Letter Home

    By Nabina Das
    Dear mother and father and old and young people of my home. Dear pets and weeds and flowers and footfalls. I write to you in a script speckled with time. I write to the language of a poet and many...
  • Poem

    poetry-magazine

    Glory Be to the Gang Gang Gang

    By Momtaza Mehri
    In praise of all that is honest, call upon the acrylic tips
    and make a minaret out of a middle finger, gold-dipped
    and counting. In the name of Filet-O-Fish, pink lemonade,
    the sweat on an upper lip, the backing swell and ache
    of Abdul...
  • Poem

    poetry-magazine

    Psalm

    By Adonis
    Translated By Kareem James Abu-Zeid & Ivan Eubanks
    I amuse myself with my country.
         I glimpse its future approaching on the eyelashes of an ostrich, I toy with its history and its days, I strike it with stones and thunderbolts. I extinguish its lamps and light its windows, and...
  • Poem

    poetry-magazine

    Ghazal

    By Edil Hassan
    it is dark here & still you have al nur at your neck when fajr does not come
    my body is the color of mourning / not dua or dawah / so I say let the day come

    my body is fajr...
  • Poem

    poetry-magazine

    Ode to Dalya’s Bald Spot

    By Angel Nafis
    my sister wraps the throw
    around herself on the small
    cream loveseat & i know
    for sure that she is not
    a speck of dirt on a pill.
    she coughs & sniffs up all
    the lucky air in the room
    into her excellent nostrils,
    which are endless
    holy wells...
  • Poem

    poetry-magazine

    washee/was she

    By Sahar Muradi
    she was washee i told her you are
    like your motherland a wilderness
    needs a belt laid down two white
    hotel towels took her into the tub to
    wudu the boys out of her mouth pointed
    her nipples toward qibla wiped clean
    her intention to perform...
  • Poem

    poetry-magazine

    Unmotioning

    By Aria Aber
    Especially in line for the food bank,
    my mother radiated grace. Talked
    a machinery of Principles. Elm trees
    and their dresses of urine, her small mouth
    always chiding, don’t speak to a man of that kind.
    This daily commitment to life felt laborious, haram.
    Expendable it...
  • Poem

    poetry-magazine

    A woman is never still

    By Afshan Shafi
    At one time,
    if my nails had been painted
    this shade of rose-foam in Kabul
    they would have rammed
    out the frosted shell
    like the tarp off
    a bud’s wet belly,
    they would have gouged out
    each shining beast,
    viscera still shiny,
    each glittering pore
    still insane
    with breath

    The pain is meant
    to...
  • Poem

    poetry-magazine

    Small Talk

    By Momtaza Mehri
    you michelangelo’s crouching boy/you d’angelo’s purr/you dead currency/you dead presidents/you a stick of incense/you a stick-up artist/you haraami/you the hum of a lifetime basined in my lap/count our tallies of loss backward for me/run to the bank & translate it...
  • Poem

    poetry-magazine

    an introduction

    By Sheena Raza Faisal
    my god wakes up with bed head
    and sticky fingers, doesn’t
    want to go into work today

    my god forgets to do the dishes
    lets all the houseplants die

    my god teenages
    built this earth on Friday night
    and tires of it on Sunday morning

    my god commands
    a...
  • Poem

    @Allah

    By Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb
    In a seaside desert port
    that wasn’t yet a city
    our grandfather built a wide house
    and called it gulistan
     
    There were no roses there
    just the new government
    four children that would be seven and a porch
    where he stitched shoes and mixed paste
    for paper...
  • Poem

    poetry-magazine

    Waiting for the Twelfth

    By Kaveh Akbar
    no one ever brings up the wages
    of virtue        the cost of avoiding

    that which you were built
    to do        some men actually love

    their enemies        remind me to tell you
    about them when you arrive and

    when...
Newsletters

Sign up for Poetry Foundation newsletters

Sign Up