Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore (born 1940) is one of the best sufi poet in contemporary time. His poetry are praised among many as: "Daniel Moore is that rarity among his contemporaries – a surrealist of the sacred", "Daniel Moore’s poetry is the exercise of the divine, an open gate to the wilderness of the eternal", "Daniel Moore’s poem soar long after the ink has dried and the pen lifted". (credit)The celebrated poet has recently started his poetry blog EcstaticXchange in wordpress. Do visit to dive into his beautiful poetry and inspiring vision that celebrate the divine. In the blog EcstaticXchange, the author expressed his enlightening thoughts on poetry which is worth sharing. Following is selected part from the article: Some thoughts on poetry/essay::
Poetry is the original language of mankind. Or, with a little imagination, it might even be said to be the original language of animals, those emotive creatures, who must choose resemblances and learn to decode the meanings of things in order to survive - or even bees, those most poetic of insects, scanning the flowery countryside for nectar and pollen the way a good student might scan the lines of a great poem, metrically buzzing in heart and head.
I could even go so far as to say poetry is the language of cells, who split and join, search and avoid, the way words fall into place to describe or evoke, emerging from silence. Or the DNA language, that scans, has recognizable meter, a certain grammar or prosody of associations, markers, signs… But that might be going a bit too far, though only Allah knows how far we might go in the mysterious workings of the imagination, that enters dimensions unreachable by reason alone, before we exceed or betray the truth.
Poetry is also the language of feeling, of spiritual states often and most purely beyond the reach of simple reason. In fact, in many cases symbolic or oblique language might be the best to connect with the raw reality of things, of how things are, as well as of states of intuition and realization that can’t be spoken of directly.
... poetry is the probing and expansive imagination living in the sounds and meanings of words, or an act of heightened speech to make the world more transparent, and its more intimate meanings to emerge, even if evanescent, or emotive. To get down to a core, or see more deeply into the flame before flying in. Or better, to see the Names of Allah behind every manifestation, by virtue of verbal corrective lenses, and then to go through the manifest names to He Who manifests them, Allah, the unified single Name Who contains all names. And this gets close to what shaykh Muhammad ibn al-Habib of Fez, may Allah protect his secret, says in his Diwan,
“Truly created beings are meanings projected in images” (The Diwan of Shaykh Muhammad ibn al-Habib). And the Prophet himself, peace be upon him, said that “In poetry is wisdom” (Bukhari).
The purpose, for me, of poetry, then, is illumination, a form of dhikr with transformative capabilities. (selection only) read the full article here.
Visit: EcstaticXchange - Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore Poetry
:: Also visit Daniel Moore's official poetry website danielmoorepoetry
:: Poem Simple sainthood - dedicated to Abdal-Hayy Moore
:: Biography of Daniel Moore
image credit: Philadelphia stories
COMMENTS