Photo by Steve McSkudder on Unsplash
Hijrah*
I’ve been here and there looking for my Promised Land hearing sweet voices through the wall and the sound of my boots on gravel straining my ear at the feedback crackle of the universe and treating it, like everything else, as primary evidence back then, God drifted between days and clouds with his cosmic spyglass burning a hole through the sun or just dancing there between proof and desertion I waited for Him in the cloud of dust that my brother left us when he drove off far from here but my panic set me down gently in a parking lot off Ilford High Street, deep in dreams. Grey morning filled my eyes I had gone blind with His fleeting image staggering home in the half-light to my father’s voice making the house shake with adhaan my mother whispering prayers wiping her tears and my little brother half-prostrated in mock-salah grinning at me he asks me who God is and where He lives
* Hijrah: A migration or sacred journey, often used to refer to Prophet Muhammed’s escape from persecution in Mecca to refuge in the city of Medinah