Iftar, Breaking the Fast

We consume iftar on top of a low-rise building:
everything east is white, even the hills


covered with houses like mushrooms over moss.
To the west, we eat an orange sunset over desert.


Pink clouds frame a monstrous stone turtle
and we smoke melon-flavored shisha toward Mecca, exhale white


against white against white against white.
But where is God here?--Here, on Ruth and Naomi's land,


Moses's deathbed, Salome's dance floor where Yahya's ghostly head rolls.
The water of Jesus's baptism flows through our faucet.


In all truth, we ran away. Across the Atlantic,
and still, nostalgia sticks


in this night, along the rim of expat liquor glasses of lemon,
a song, the occasional panging notes searching for solace


like the flies that cling to our skin for moisture,
for the comfort something else is alive in this desert.


A whisper rises from the sand like the breath
of our someday dead mother buried on foreign land.


Somehow the desert holds a hope
lost in adolescence, forgotten and strange with time--


hope in the smile of a young man smoking
agila across from us, the way he breathes


Inshallah, hope in the lonely bus ride home
with only the lights of Amman as company,


hope in the twanging, bending, lilting,
hypnotizing bus-nomad music of this country


my body hasn't learned how to follow yet,
hope in night sky geometries, the shifting isosceles


of Jupiter, Venus and the crescent moon,
in the haunting isha'a melody of the muezzin,


the call for everyone to fold and be still.
Perhaps even for the heathens like us.