I must admit, as one raised Catholic, that my knowledge of Islam is woefully inadequate. Tonight, at a second night seder at a friend's house, I was fortunate enough to be seated next to a professor in out university who's work specializes in Sufi poetry. Now, since we were well past the part of the evening where you drink wine, a lot of that conversation is now escaping me. But the pith of what she told me is that Sufi poetry, through out the centuries, has blossomed in response to turmoil and war, and that Sufi scholars have always made poetry their means of commenting on the powerful and violent, and bringing war to its end.
This scolar read a beautiful poem tonight. I am not usually a poetry person, but in that moment I felt the power of words and craft running counter to the destruction and death that I knew was ongoing as we sat there eating bitter herbs and giving thanks.
In my ignorance of Islam, I had never felt the healing power of these scholars and poets, and had never even imagined that it existed. I would like to know more about Sufi Islam, and if anyone out there reads this and know more (easy to know more than me, I assure you), could you share? If we could bring our ignorance to an end, then maybe we can bring violence to an end too.
Also, it got me to thinking about the poems that have helped us to work through the outrages of the twentieth century. As I was listening to the poem that she read tonight, not understanding a word but loving the rhythm, I thought of Auden's "Epitaph on a Tyrant":
Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
and when he cried the little children died in the streets.
That one seems to resonate with the moment.
Another poem that got read tonight is Martin Espada's "Remember the Angels of Bread." I don't have a copy of it to post here, but it too seemed powerful enough to soothe the injury of the day, that many people had died and suffered purposelessly.
Where is the poetry to fix the mess of today? Would the Sufi poets please step forward and take command before anyone else gets hurt?
I would like to end by saying that I am not as drunk as this post makes me seem, but I am as hopelessly naive as it makes me seem.