A Letter to Prophet Muhammad ( pbuh) – Rizwan Akhtar

I have laid bare my heart sealed by your memory, birds

trees together sing a genre of melancholic desert song

plead for your intervention summers are too hot to spend

but have heard the wind deflected by your Green Dome

brings a flood of fragrance, a numerologist told me that

all of Your names constellate emotions quite unguarded.

You know the world is too difficult a place to live (you

who have mounted camels and conversed with Beduins

pruning their rugged tones) shrines are squandered

by half-baked chaplet-churning custodians no reprieve

from pandemics the Burmese monks chopped heads of

Rohingya now the Russians have invaded Ukraine

the Prime Minister of Pakistan is sent home the one

who told the world that when you blaspheme our Beloved

pain runs through body seeps into nerves but there are

others cold bodies our courts of law uniformed testing

missiles against an unknown enemy collect their booty

from imperial shopping malls and markets of a world

divided between Macrons and Trumps hedging Arabs

dancing behind them holding swords with blunt edges—

the stripped Prime Minister wields over crowds for he

can sense, against all calumny, Your love spilling over—

a dervish munches stale bread smilingly, evening’s

Call for Prayer opens libations of Ramzan, a restless

sparrow calms dipping tiny beak in a clayed pot of water—

I implore! visit our forsaken hordes make us reiterate vows

that we shall house migrants, read our neighbours poems of

polite pangs— the Almighty and his angels repeat your name!

Rizwah Akhtar, April, 2022

Publisher of Pat's Guide to Glasgow West End; the community guide to the West End of Glasgow. Fiction and non-fiction writer.

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