Some Poetry on New Year’s Morning

It is about war. It is a beautiful piece of work about war. Click the title to get the background.

All I can see is nothing Sahar Muradi

^{If nothing that can be seen can either be God or represent Him to us as He is, then to find God we must pass beyond everything that can be seen and enter into darkness.
Since nothing that can be heard is God, to find Him we must enter into silence.
—Thomas Merton, from “New Seeds of Contemplation,” 1961}

^{I swear to God, mom, I am exhausted, but praise be to God in all circumstances.
—writing, translated from the Arabic, on the Al-Shifa Hospital walls, April 2024}

All I can see is nothing
Fields of

Hollow
The O that escapes

A pasture of
Mouths

An apartment building
Of locked jaws

The silent weeping
Of rocks

I hear nothing
In the bags of soft limbs sighing

Milk teeth
Sharpening a father’s heart

The cone hat on the small head
Singing to plumes

Iftar in the tents
Flapping pages off the moon

But Your name over and over
On the hospital walls

But Your name stilling
The fire that does not cease

But Your name everywhere
Everything all at once

I see nothing
From this distance

This deepest night
This longest darkness

Fumble at fajr
To loosen my gasps

I repeat Your name
Over and over

Then bow to Your wisdom
To the terror of Your liberation

O that I may not see anything
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Copyright © 2024 by Sahar Muradi. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 31, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.