They are there yet apart - listening cats on the garden wall
happy they have purred for milk which then comes…without acid.
Distance is growth.

They have heard all this and more - world-weary, bone-bored 
as excited as watching paint dry on a perennial sounding board. 
Distance is indifference.

Distance is hostility -
when milk is not sought but given… with acid - resolutely, inescapably; 
when every single reaction seethes in a cauldron of shocking heat – a potboiler without end;
without end the wait for the slurry to cool; to know if foam and froth was a volcanic song -  
finished or unfinished.

When family heals
Earth heals.
Distance may heal.

My forefathers heard the call of the murshid in their veins -
ancient blood and stardust flowed as one. 
They followed their blood, sometimes to earth’s end,
sometimes to the next village
till the call became a form, the form a teacher
and Time stood still. 

I am a different kind of nomad -
hearing the call of a different bloodflow;
they call me 'minority'.
In reality a scapegoat, a scapegoat to a need for revenge
in the others, the majority -
so they feel shored up against their own suffering.
'Let the bastard suffer so I don't. 
Let the rat die so there's no threat to ME.'           
It keeps my mind moving, throbbing, hurting, raging
to the ancient drumbeat of bigotry, sectarianism, war.
The beat pulses likewise in reptilian minds 
below the threshold of the conscious,
where threats could be real or imagined;
flaring up in the collective as flashpoints - 
fomenting isolation, feeding tension, fueling assault. 
For the illusion of security,  
for the illusion of approval of a community.

Beneath my turbulent veins
I hear my forefathers call -
I just about hear it.
It is a call for prayer and forgiveness,
a song of love for their murshid, 
a song of love for one another,
for Nature and for poetry
in submission to the murshid, 
in submission to our own oneness.