THREE POEMS BY DANIEL ABDAL-HAYY MOORE
(1940 – 2016)
SIREN AT NIGHT
Why is it a siren at night sounds like
someone crying for help
or else despairing of help?
Why is it the city at night is like a
single person with disturbed sleep
generally peaceful but now and then
thrashing from side to side
and yelling out
under the imponderable stars?
Tonight perhaps one person in this entire city’s made the
permanent breakthrough into an undying
spectacular radiance that would
light up any number of national
wonders like the Grand Tetons or even
New York itself
yet no one might know of it
but his caged bird or his
insouciant cat
curled up asleep under the chair of epiphany
in the roofless room of the
Divine Presence
whose doors and windows have
exploded with light
Now there’s another siren across town
speeding to its dutiful appointment
and I pray for safe outcome
surrounded by voices of
sweet council and high jubilation
and the newly ascended saintly one might also
be hearing it with me and be
flying to the scene in the Unseen
to see by God’s pure Seeing
what should be done
and by no action of his own
doing it
THAT FIRST MEMORY
We looked out our mid-winter window in Norwich, England
onto a
backyard being dusted with snow. There’s never any
snow in Norwich! But the snow kept
falling. Finally we
ran out in it, you
three years old, shouting
“Let’s make a snowman! ” Not much to
make one with, snow so soft and
powdery, but we
scraped one together, and pretty soon not a bad
snow-dude appeared, mostly a
tall mound, hardly any head, hardly any
arms at all, but I put my
knitted sock-cap on it to give it
class. Your mother leaned
out the window and threw us a
carrot for nose, and we looked around for
stones for eyes, no
coal nuggets near, until finally we had a
real old-fashioned bone fide
snowman worth crowing about. We
crowed. Your mom
crowed from the kitchen. The snowman was well-
crowed. Suddenly I had a flash about sculpted images,
idols, molded to cast
shadows, monotheism’s
constant contention against them, prophet Abraham’s
victory for
imageless Majesty, and said, “Hey, this is an
idol, we have to
knock it down – only God is real! ” You
loved this idea, and clapped your
mitts together, yelling, “Yeah, let’s
destroy the idol! ” You mom disagreeing and
“Oh-no”ing disappointedly from the
window. We scooped up snowballs and started
pelting the snowman to
slush, slowly
eroding his head, bombarding his
torso to
a pile of shapeless snow again, really getting out
backs into it, “Take this, you idol, and this (splat!), and
this! ” Laughing
until we were exhausted and
done. And you’ve remained
deeply impressed by this memory, saying it’s your
very first memory, that stubborn
powerful fiction that actually
shapes our consciousnesses
all the rest of our days.
AT SOME POINT
Vision perceives Him not, but He perceives [all] vision; and He is the Subtle, the Acquainted.
(Surah al-An‘aam: 103)
At some point you
have to decide just
how much you want an
entirely new perception of things
as they are
We’re not going to find God
in a threadbare overcoat
in a dank laboratory
down a zigzag street on a
moonlit night in
Vienna
Who turns to us nevertheless
with a most radiant smile —
but in everything and nothing
there and there and there
The songbird never alights too
long on any branch
until it plans to sleep
there
It’s all to do with
radical simultaneity
or as the Buddhists say:
“Interdependent Arising”
of neon green farmland going on
for miles
fringed with willow copses
under bright blue sky
firefly on the carpet
blinks its thanks when
returned back outside
Nothing reveals Him more
than His invisibility
though “The Invisible One” is not
one of the Ninety-Nine Names of God
nor is “The Visible One”
but only
“He Who Sees”
About the Poet:
Berkeley CA, 1970: A young Beat poet by the name of Daniel Moore was causing a sensation in the Counterculture scene with his poetry, not to mention his fake fur-covered Chevy with deer antlers on the bonnet, Astroturf carpeting the floor, and a toadstool for a driver’s seat.
Where do you go after you’ve rubbed shoulders with Allen Ginsberg and Frank McClure, and had your debut collection of poems published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti of the legendary City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco? For several years Daniel had visited gurus, sat in zazen with Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki, practised yoga every morning, and led a “sacred theatre” troupe, The Floating Lotus Magic Opera Company, complete with handmade puppets, skull necklaces, drums, flutes and lots of long, wavy hair.
This circle of avant-garde artists – who saw Daniel as a kind of spiritual leader – didn’t just want to shake up the turgid American psyche of the time with their eclectic mashup of shamanism, Zen and Tibetan Buddhism and Hinduism, as seen through acid-coloured glasses: their lofty ambition was, in fact, to exorcise America’s demons of violence and war. Several public performances (to audiences whose drinks were spiked, of course) earned them an article in Rolling Stone magazine in February 1970:
“The shaping spirit of the Floating Lotus company is a lion-maned poet named Daniel Moore… Though he exerts himself to make the opera a collective product, through group meditation at rehearsals, continual rewriting and the interaction of living closely with the actors, it is necessarily deeply stamped with his spirit. It is poetic, rather than dramatic stage…”
A copy of this magazine wound its way to a Paris café terrace, where a certain Scotsman was reading it. An American sitting at the next table noticed the picture of Daniel, leaned over and commented that he knew him. The Scotsman asked politely for Daniel’s number; it turned out that he had recently returned from a visit to the Zawiyah of the great Moroccan Sufi, Shaykh Muhammad Ibn al-Habib, where he had embraced Islam, taking the name ‘Abdal-Qadir, and been made a Muqaddim (“one who brings forward”) of the Darqawiyya-Habibiyya order.
Daniel seemed like a natural person with whom to share this spiritual path; a cultural influencer like him might inspire others to follow suit. As it happened, that year Daniel had come across R.A. Nicholson’s translation of Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi’s Mathnawi, and taken to giving impromptu readings in the hallway of the brownstone building where he lived, in a temple-like attic room where he was busily typing up a new poetry manuscript.
Arriving in Berkeley, Shaykh ‘Abdal-Qadir went straight to the artist commune and Daniel’s attic room, where he proceeded to regale him with a vivid depiction of Islam and the saint he had so recently seen. Daniel was captivated:
“For the three days following our meeting, two other Americans and I listened in awe as this magnificent storyteller unfolded the picture of Islam, of the perfection of the Prophet Muhammad, and of the 100 year old plus Shaykh, sitting under a great fig tree in a garden with his disciples, singing praises of Allah. It was everything I’d always dreamed of. It was poetry come alive. It was the visionary experience made part of daily life, with the Prophet a perfectly balanced master of wisdom and simplicity, an historically accessible Buddha, with a mixture of the earthiness of Moses, the otherworldliness of Jesus, and a light all his own.”
The same year, Daniel made a trip to Meknes for the annual Moussem gathering in homage to the saint Sidi Muhammad Ibn Al-Habib, where he was given the name ‘Abdal-Hayy, formally accepted the tariqa, and committed to help establish this Sufi order in the US. Over the next few years he was involved in several zawiyahs in Berkeley, where a small but enthusiastic group of converts converged. He recognised that the wird (litany) of his Shaykh that he was reciting twice daily and the Diwan (poetry collection) they sang at their nightly dhikr sessions would have a formative impact on his understanding of poetry. In it, he writes, he
“…saw poetry in its true function as a joining of beauty with truth. Here was poetry that had a spiritual reality to lead its reader or reciter (or singer) to enlightenment (and connecting to my earlier interest in sacred texts), as a vehicle for knowledge of Allah…to know Him by His multifarious manifestations on earth and in the heavens.”
In keeping with Daniel’s myriad fascinations, his encyclopaedic poetic references and wholehearted drive to know and honour Truth in all its disclosures, when Abdal-Hayy returned to writing around 1980, the poetry that poured out was rich in cosmic imagery, sprinkled with gazelles and zebras and geese flying overhead, but also brought home with street scenes, contemporary references and tender vignettes of family life. It is a deeply personal prayer, proof positive that love of Allah can be expressed in any mother tongue, and that the “signs on the horizons” can be found in the most everyday and surprising of places.
Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore continued writing prolifically until he was no longer able to hold a pen. After struggling against cancer for five years, he passed away peacefully in 2016, rahimAllah. Two collections of his last poems, Transitioning to Zero and Holy Door in the Ground, were published posthumously, and are a lucid testimony to his longing for Allah, accepting all the rigours of his illness as the purification needed to meet his Creator in the best state possible.
Abdal-Hayy wrote over sixty manuscripts, at least 25 of which were published. With such a broad bibliography, a Selected Poems anthology of his finest work is long overdue. His family and friends are currently crowdfunding to make this finally possible; you can watch the video about Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore’s extraordinary life and work and preorder your copy of From a Shore Beyond Water at www.launchgood.com/ecstatic-exchange.
*Words by Medina Tenour Whiteman
To read more of Abdal-Hayy’s poetry visit his digital archive ‘ Ecstatic Exchange ‘
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