Poets and Poems: Yahia Lababidi and "Desert Songs"

For millennia, the desert has been a place of both severity and serenity. Its landscape – stark, unyielding, and often brutal – entices as often as it repels. It is a place that allows life only to that which can adapt to its harsh conditions. It is this “life stripped to bare essentials” that has attracted hermits, prophets, and seers. Three of the world’s major religions – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – began in or adjacent to a desert landscape. The Bible and the Koran are filled with desert imagery and stories. 

It is to the desert, writes Yahia Lababidi in the preface to his newest collection of poems, Desert Songs, that he would periodically visit to empty himself of the noise of Cairo and lose himself. These pilgrimages of purification and renewal were underscored, he said, by the sense that he would find a part of himself that he would not find anywhere else.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Desert cry

After Psalm 107:4-7

Wandering. Arid. Dry.

Parched. Seering. Desert. Heat

overpowering. No protection

from sun or wind or hear,

no refuge to find, no oasis.

Sand, and rocks, and 

Unrelenting heat. Body

fails, soul fails, collapsing

in the sand, tasting 

the hot grains, what little

moisture is left evaporating

until I become a piece

of parchment, edges seared 

by flame, and I cry out,

without hope, a sound

anguished in extreme.

The cry is heard, the listening

lifts and carries me

to the refuge.

Photograph by Ian Dooley via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Fight Back with Joy: Praying for Springs

For a time. in between formal communications jobs, I had my own consulting business. The first two years were good ones, but then a recession caught up with me and business dried up. It didn’t disappear, but it became very, very difficult; jobs were few and far between.

In our Sunday School class, we shared what was going on and asked for prayer. Some weeks later, an envelope containing three hundred dollars inside of a card showed up in mail. No name. Just a $300 gift.

We were not in dire financial straits. But we were discouraged. And that $300 gift was a blessing far beyond the amount of the money. It was finding a little oasis in the desert.

We have each experienced desert times –when everything seems pointless, your body is close to exhaustion, you don’t think you can read one more newspaper without throwing up, an illness is more and more debilitating, a family problem that seems never to be resolved, a crisis in faith or hope. We’ve each been there, and likely more than once.

Life is not easy.

In Fight Back With Joy: Celebrate More. Regret Less. Stare Down Your Greatest Fears, Margaret Feinberg talks about those desert times, and how important finding those springs in the desert can be. While she’s struggling with the side effects of chemotherapy, she receives a reference to the Book of Judges, the story Othniel and how he wins the hand of Caleb’s daughter, Achsah. After they’re married, she asks her father for a piece of thriving land in the desert, one with springs of water. And Caleb complies, giving her and her husband both lower and upper springs – an assured supply and more than she asked for.

Feinberg is able to find her own springs of water, one of which was a Bill Cosby concert in Vermont. These springs are vital for all of us; they are what keep us going when we face trials, problems, and situations that we hope are problems and not conditions that have to be endured.

As many times as I’ve read the Book of Judges, I did not remember the story of Othniel and Achsah. It’s right there in the first chapter, verses 11 to 15 (Feinberg paraphrases it as only a storyteller can). What I did remember was that Othniel eventually became one of the “Judges” or rulers.

Those springs of water worked well for him, too.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading Fight Back with Joy. To see more posts on this chapter, “One Prayer You Don’t Pray But Should,” please visit Sarah at Living Between the Lines.

Photograph: Desert Oasis via Wikipedia.

The water of anticipation

He still remembers a time

when it was not desert,

not locusts and honey. But

the memory is fading,

blurring around breaking

edges where real meets

imagination

his mother’s touch, soft

voice, his father’s arm

to lean on, the rabbi’s

prayer, men reading

from the scrolls

of parchment, yellow

and brittle

he walked into the desert,

his parents’ eyes on his back,

his tangled hair; he has not

seen them since but

the longing is paired

with contentment, often

he knows his place, what

he is to do, to say, and so he

begins to talk to rocks and

bees and snakes and scorpions

and birds, anything that moves,

at first, until one or two hear

and remain, then the others

after the words come

the words with water, standing

in the river, the one they crossed

for the promise. He watches

the crowds as he talks,

looking, waiting,

anticipating

Photograph by Lila Frerichs via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Desert time

Not 40 years of purification

not 40 days of temptation

not honey and locusts

not days of birth pangs

   or groaning too terrible

   to endure

but a desert time

arid

heat in the day

cold in the night

   but dry

   always dry

an ocean of sand

   windblown

   waterless

   without shade

   or respite

wandering in desert time

Photograph by Lila Frerichs via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission. 

The stones

A place of terrible heat,

heat bleeding the skin;

a place of terrible cold,

cold snapping the bone;

a place of no relief,

of no belief,

until the stones

themselves cry out.

Photograph: Desert Boulders by Ronald Carlson via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.