Your House is Not our Home

Airways like barricades, your notes are dead to me
A deaf ear to the nonsense bred to restrict the conscious
...just to dilute our progress.
This is a twisted war, with censored signs of conflict
In the land of the free made by slaves, no reparation paid
No education to disclose the tactics
Censorship is your tool, where ignorance is your practice
And you build dream houses, with glass ceilings
Look up and the sky’s the limit so you can only imagine,
Look around and your held captive in your oppressor’s mansion
In a space that dictates your freedom of motion
Until you realize dreams cannot be confined
And freedom cannot be measured in liberties denied
Because it (freedom) exists as a state of mind
So until we frame ourselves with love crimes of the revolutionary kind
How can we feel at home?

The Composition of Silence

Bismillah...

Prayer wells up inside me
Like un-cried tears; their emergence clinging to the back of my throat in the name of strength,
Like the passion of unfaltering hearts-pumping-loader-than-freedom-fighting-fists-in-the-air resistance,
Like dreams coagulating in my heart, in search of permanence

…As I move towards remembrance.

Yes, this is a physical place.
This wanderer in my ribcage sometimes visits it
And sometimes gets caught in emotional traffic on the way
Sometimes needs a place to store its baggage for the day.

As prayer wells up
As time runs in a race with no one
As bellies swell out of both hunger and gluttony
As the earth holds her tongue to our injustice,
Biting it until it bleeds the same crimson red that creates rivers of unholy sacrifice on her back:
Colonized by heartache, occupied by apathy.

I can feel her back seething with untold stories as I walk on it,
Knee-deep against her current as my feet knock on it.
(As if someone could answer and satisfy all my curiosity about her at once)
And sometimes when she trips me…I think she is reminding me of her presence.
Saying in her silent way: "remember...there are more souls under me than above me,
So walk with caution."

I imagine her seas are hard to sail, like my coagulated dreams…
From the things she’s seen, I imagine there is a nightmare under her skin for every dream.

I imagine the opening of those pores would unleash screams
Of fear and ecstasy
The sounds of buried prayer
These divine conversations unspoken
They were just infants learning the art of speech
And the mechanics of utterance…

So they could teach it to this wanderer in my ribcage
Over and over in the perpetual course of destiny
As prayers well up, over and overflowing.

This wanderer...
I hear she is fluent in love,
and every syallable of hate she understands was force-fed at the hands of her weaknesses
But still I want to speak with her...
I want to consult her so I can translate my experiences
Into submission
In either gratitude or repentance
but I struggle to read the stories inscribed in her valves
Stutter at every sentence.

These hieroglyphic curves of pictorial words…
Dancing to distortion, an inaccessible beat …
I tried to play my symphony over the confusion,
but I cannot mask ugliness with beauty and expect peace
There is no peace until these silences sound just as sweet as these compositions

Until these words are more than the poetry they compose.

I pray to translate and transcribe (them)
Before time brings death to life
So I drink from this beautiful well
Of scriptures and eternity –the milk of the earth

And quench my thirst…
for the fifth time today.
Assalaamu alaikum wa rahmatullah,
Assalaamu alaikum wa rahmatullah.

Educated out of learning

The videos below show some insights into how the contemporary school system is affecting us and why it may be time for educational reform...

Video 1: "Shaykh Hamza talks about school life in the USA"

This is an interesting panel discussion I came across concerning the documentary "Race to Nowhere," which is a film critiqing the rigid and formulaic sturcture of western school systems.




Video 2: "School Kills Creativity"

Sir Ken Robinson discusses the school system's negligence towards fostering creativity and the displinary hierarchy that exists within the system, pressuring children towards careers deemed to be more "prestigious" and honourable.



I hope you found the above videos as enlightening and insightful as I have. It’s important to reflect on the effects of the institutional structures that have indoctrinated us to perceive learning in a certain way and challenge our own perceptions. Are we really in school because we feel that academia is the best environment to nurture our personal talents? Or are we simply going through the motions, following the script, and standing in line?