Photo by Austin Gardner on Unsplash

 

Catholic priests crucified
on Good Friday in Mosul,
children blown to bits in Gaza

In Lahore’s Shalimar Gardens see
a piece of pink heaven on this bloodyearth.
built by the Mughals to celebrate God
in marbled, mosaic mosques:

Wats celebrate the Buddhists,
temples the Hindus,
the Sufi saints moved into the future
keeping their close hold onto the past.

We celebrate the Christians and the Jews
who were joined to the Muslims, as brothers,
as peoples of the book.

Now, instead of scholarship, the Islamic world is defamed
by these devils of savagery, mass graves, beheadings, blasphemy
all the narrow cruelties of Salafist Wahhabis
emanate from that nest of vipers
Saudi Arabia

Where heaven is only to be found
by those who murder in the name of G-d,
those who read between the pages of a closed book.

Come, instead and look at the beauty of the  Calat Alhambra
described by the Moorish poets as a pearl set in an emerald sea
built whilst, we, Saxons and Celts,
still laboured in the mud to turn a sod.

Come view the Alameda de la Alhambra,
so full of wild flowers,
roses, oranges and myrtle, the air filled with the songs
of nightingales, the music of streams and cascades;
a very heaven built by these majestic Muslim Moors.

 

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