Playing the Sonata of Life

Life lying with beckoning arms,
decked in all its fineries;

Piercing gazes of fiery passion,
enticing into its enchanting embrace;

Existence itself as if a still motion,
contradictory in terms but somehow pertinent;

A conundrum of truth, fabrication and dreams,
dissolving into a plethora of conjectural dissonance;

Somewhere, somehow, the glowing warmth of a guiding light,
reaches out to the dark recesses, the abyss of the heart;

As if enlivening the deadened piece of flesh,
as if turning it sanguine once again;

Making the languid spirit rise on command,
to free itself from the shackles of conditional remand;

Stifled by years of encasement in the prison of its being,
breathless now for the Kiss of Life to bring it back to living;

The soul breaks free, magnetically drawn to its essence,
the pleroma of being, the reality of causal existence;

The accoutrements of mortality, the demands of physicality,
like chains to a convict's feet, prove to be for the soul a disability;

The breathing "I" reaching out with tearing ligaments of temporal attachment,
turning slowly to thread-like remains of increasing detachment;

The pain of inevitable separation and the tears of anguish,
make the soul, heart, intellect, all relinquish;

All that remains is the circling frenzy of contemplative ecstasy,
soaring to the highest highs, sinking to the lowest lows;

The ebb and flow of being and non-being enacted by the crashing wave,
the quest for meaning, the search for peace, a legacy that time immemorial gave;

A voice rising within claims the agitated soul,
guiding it readily to its awaited goal;

"The false glory of man's greatness, the ruse of deceptive permanence,
decry, decry them all, the pawns of manipulative hindrance;

Dig beneath the pyramids of selfish renown,
bare the treasures that lie hidden beneath the carcasses of lust and pride;

Apply the alchemy of old,
to turn your worthless worth to gold";

The soul is reborn enveloped in a silent new consciousness,
the voice departs though leaving its lingering freshness;

The soul rejoicing in its born-free state,
cognizing Haq it now does at last contemplate;

It enters at will the embrace of life,
yet wise to its conniving ploy;

It resides in peace and to peace it calls,
awakening from slumber before the final curtain falls.



Written by Naila Amat-un-Nur

From her book "The Journey back to Allah"