Poetry

Asalamu alaikum! 🌙

Come hang with us for Poetry in the Park — an evening of poetry, open mic, good company, and an open jam session with the Crescent Moon Nights community.

📍 Rock Creek Park, Picnic Grove 06
📅 Saturday, September 5
🚪 Come through starting at 4:30 PM
🎤 Poetry + jam session from 5–7 PM
🎟️ Completely free!

Bring a poem, bring an instrument, bring a friend — or just bring yourself and enjoy the evening with us.

Register here:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeNZw117VqCT5Mw-HIAcF-C20CrN9SZSK_sqgXmRNjr6faXdw/viewform?usp=publish-editor

Can’t wait to see y’all in the park, inshaAllah! 🌙

Excerpt from my novel Apricity

CHAPTER ? – VEHEMENCE

“Name?” The elderly receptionist peered through her spectacles and gawked at the young man. It wasn’t every day that someone so young came to visit.
“Zachariah Durrani.” The young man spoke confidently.
“And your relation to the prisoner?” The receptionist noted down his name.
“I’m the eldest son of Kareem Ghilzai, prisoner number 235789.”
“You’re on time. You can go in.” The receptionist pressed the buzzer dutifully, and the chained doors opened.
Zac walked through. He had done this walk many times. The first time was the worst, he remembered his throat tightening and his stomach lurching. The faces of the other prisoners haunted him. Their sunken eyes, the life drained from them and their slow gaits. It was like watching an animal bleed slowly to death.

These men used to be people walking the earth, being a part of society, but now they were reduced to four walls and measly scraps of food. They would mutter when they would see Zac and had a glimmer of hope before they realized he was not a lawyer but a visitor. Him always visiting in a full suit did not help his case of course, but he did it out of habit.

The prison was Fordgate Prison, England’s highest security prison. Only the worst came here.
Zac went into the calling room. The usual dread crept in and swirled around his mind, his face beginning to pale. He ran a nervous hand through his hair before sitting down. He picked up the phone and held it to his ear gingerly.

“You’re looking well, my son.” Kareem sighed, placing a hand on the screen. He always a strong craving to touch his son’s face, to feel the contours of it and to marvel at what was half his and half his wife’s. His genetically superior offspring sat before him, but not with a smile. Kareem wanted to lift the corners of Zac’s perfect mouth and force it into a smile. Which son looks so miserable to see his father like this? It was truly horrible. “You’re looking more and more like me as time goes on.”

Kareem was right. Zac was the spitting image of Kareem. They had the same warm and charming peridot green eyes, sharp jawline, and high cheekbones. Zac had wavy hair whilst Kareem’s was poker straight and fell in two salt-and-pepper curtains. Kareem’s face had wrinkles, the etches of age showing through but it somehow suited him.

Zac could see patches in his father’s greying beard and knew he did that with a razor out of sheer laziness. While Zac was in his suit, Kareem was in blue prison clothes, a simple light blue t-shirt which hugged his wide back, a pair of matching trousers and white trainers. His number tag was on the right-hand side of his chest.
“The power of genetics.” Zac replied through gritted teeth. “Remove your hand.”
“You still have an attitude I see, mashallah.” Kareem did not remove his hand from the screen and instead moved it from side to side slowly. “How are Joury and the twins?”
“Doing well. Joury just got a promotion, and the girls are thriving at university.” Zac paused. He fidgeted about on his seat before smiling, “They take after their mother.”
“Don’t bring her up.” Kareem grimaced. He would always make this twisted face when Zac mentioned his mother.

“💠_ Dawn possesses a special sanctity. It is a stillness through which the reverence of creation quietly permeates, a time when silence is broken by the sound of the adhān and the hymn of life. At dawn, the doors of tranquility open, restoring a person’s inner balance and connection with the Creator amid a world that has not yet awakened.

Dawn is not merely an astronomical phenomenon announcing the end of night. Rather, it is a moment of primordial manifestation, when light emerges from the womb of darkness, continually renewing within the universe a kind of ‘cosmic birth.’ The earth seems to breathe through drops of dew, while currents of vitality and mental wakefulness flow through living beings._..✍️ "

“A beautiful soul is the kind of beauty time can’t fade.” 🌹

An old one of mine. My first ever, if memory serves...

🦋A Lily Bright

In a lush garden, green to sight;
Amidst thickets, and vines entwined;
A rose he saw, bloom at twilight;
His precious one, he cherished in delight.

A wish he made, a dream he dreamt;
To be ever more, in her fragrant embrace;
But a thunder like a tiger’s roar;
Awakened the dreamer to a garden, green no more.

His precious rose, in his arms lay;
Bereft of fragrance, yet a glistening array;
Doom did the thunder bring to the rose;
As she slipped away, to her lamented repose.

To the frosty winter, he surrendered his soul;
His tears countless, as diamonds froze;
Daisies and daffodils, every spring did grow;
Cascading their perfumes, but never a Rose.

Hope he forsook, and forsaken he was;
A lost sleepwalker, amidst winter’s endless frost;
Till on a cold dawn, to a path untrodden;
That flighty temptress ‘chance’, him brought.

On a frozen meadow, amongst blades of ice;
A gleam of white, like spring’s first light;
Awakened in him, a thirst for life;
It was not a rose, but a Lilly bright.

Though on a bed of ice she sprout;
Untouched were her petals, by winter’s frost;
And with her sweet scent, spring she brought;
To the heart of him, that hope now sought.

At long last did winter’s cruel frost melt;
Sweet spring has come, as he never dreamt;
And in the meadow, with his Lilly bright;
He delights in a garden, green forever more.

Tad’u

Wa khalaqnaakum ‘azwaajan,
is not merely wives as that to men,
nor merely husbands as that to women—
it’s the masculine hidden within the feminine,
the whispering feminine yearning from within.
Wa khalaqnaakum ‘azwaajan:
listen, please, to her still,
how she grips the man running from God’s plan:
he runs to things outside of himself, the real sin,
when the real call, she is there in him, the man.

I appeal into darkness.
It is an ethereal song
of pipe dreams
that never came true.

'Is this all you? Mysterious and lucid and present and absent at once'

• -Mahmoud Darwish, Lose One of Your Stars

Hii

Hai