What It Is to Be Holy

after & for Kaveh

An Arab of his country and on his country once
said to a boy born in a colony: you too are Arab

I can hear it in your voice. We only knew
each other by what was pushed out.

He said: you have a psychological map,
a pure timeline of 400 years thankful

for family to draw on. I always knew I was ancient.
How else to explain being slowly destroyed,

​left to mould in rooms, or being pored over
by people certain they knew what I meant?

He said: the holiest city in the world is quartered
and we can either blame Solomon for the idea

of carving lives in half or else all the plaintiffs
who refuse to love the whole enough.

I have taken to making my god flower
bramble, weed. Maybe to watch divinity

die or to make god observable, small, sweet
something to make honey from, never gospel.

Who was it that said you only write to the land
because the land cannot speak back?

They must not have been fluent in mountains
or an absence of certainty. I have prayed

every day in a language I know only in pieces.
No wonder I have centuries of faith locked

in my hair and nails so long, so matted.
Mattered. I keep doing that. Bleeding

belief, spilling it onto mats and garden beds.
Making love to whatever I consider holy:

the exiled light, the opening in everything,
what came before, spring, poets. Praise

be to God, Lord of all the worlds, even one
in which I am loved and let go.