Prayer Rug

BY AGHA SHAHID ALIThose intervals
between the day’s
five calls to prayer

the women of the house
pulling thick threads
through vegetables

rosaries of ginger
of rustling peppers
in autumn drying for winter

in those intervals this rug
part of Grandma’s dowry
folded

so the Devil’s shadow
would not desecrate
Mecca scarlet-woven

with minarets of gold
but then the sunset
call to prayer

the servants
their straw mats unrolled
praying or in the garden

in summer on grass
the children wanting
the prayers to end

the women’s foreheads
touching Abraham’s
silk stone of sacrifice

black stone descended
from Heaven
the pilgrims in white circling it

this year my grandmother
also a pilgrim
in Mecca she weeps

as the stone is unveiled
she weeps holding on
to the pillars

(for Begum Zafar Ali)

It have very vivid imagry.

Warm Days in January

BY DONALD REVELL

It has never been so easy to cry
openly or to acknowledge children.
Never before could I walk directly
to the center of an island city
feeling the automatism of millions
drawing one pious breath, shouldering
the sunset, holding it up in the oily
tree-line a while longer. Years ago,
I was never sad enough and nothing
but a hotel that I could tear to pieces
and reconstruct inside a shoebox
felt like home. My parents died. Their miserable
possessions washed up in other hotels,
dioramas of the febrile romantic.

I take my first lover, already
gray at her temples and more reticent
than shy, more tacit than admiring,
to the bus stop by the Jewish Museum.
We wait in the dark a long time.
She does not kiss me. She hurries
up out of the oily street onto the humming,
fluorescent podium of the last bus
where I see her a last time, not waving
to me, not lovable, erect in the freedom
we traduced years ago in our first kiss.

Never deny the power of withdrawal.
Never doubt that thought and time make things small.
Never refuse the easy exit line or prescribed
uncomprehending gesture. At childhood’s end,
none can tell happiness from buoyancy.
None of it made any difference—
the patricides, the hotels ill-constructed,
the inconstant starlight of drugs and rebellion.
We are no more complicated
than our great-grandparents who dreaded
the hotel life. Like them, we seek the refuge
of warm days in January, a piety
whose compulsion is to survive according
to explicit laws no young woman adores
or young man follows with darling hunger.

It seems like the author is looking back on his life, and it seems like he is full of regret.

What is Life?

BY JOHN CLAREAnd what is Life?—An hour-glass on the run,
A Mist retreating from the morning sun,
    A busy, bustling, still repeated dream;
Its length?—A minute’s pause, a moment’s thought;
    And happiness?—A bubble on the stream,
That in the act of seizing shrinks to nought.

What are vain Hopes?—The puffing gale of morn,
    That of its charms divests the dewy lawn,
And robs each flow’ret of its gem,—and dies;
    A cobweb hiding disappointment’s thorn,
Which stings more keenly through the thin disguise.

And thou, O Trouble?—nothing can suppose,
(And sure the power of wisdom only knows,)
    What need requireth thee:
So free and liberal as thy bounty flows,
    Some necessary cause must surely be:
But disappointments, pains, and every woe
    Devoted wretches feel,
The universal plagues of life below,
    Are mysteries still ‘neath Fate’s unbroken seal.

And what is Death? is still the cause unfound?
That dark, mysterious name of horrid sound?—
    A long and lingering sleep, the weary crave.
And Peace? where can its happiness abound?—
    No where at all, save heaven, and the grave.

Then what is Life?—When stripp’d of its disguise,
    A thing to be desir’d it cannot be;
Since every thing that meets our foolish eyes
    Gives proof sufficient of its vanity.
‘Tis but a trial all must undergo;
    To teach unthankful mortals how to prize
That happiness vain man’s denied to know,
    Until he’s call’d to claim it in the skies.

I like the fact of the imagery this poem has and some of the things this poem is discribing are easy to imagine.