The Path to Purity is Abundantly Clear | A Poem About Prayer

We all have those days when the four rakaats of asr feel so heavy

The Path to Purity is Abundantly Clear

I stand to pray and my tongue is a pink mess
of a mass wanting not to be but cold and hard,
unsupple, unyielding, bubblegum stuck
to the underbelly of a wooden madrasah desk.

I force the verses of al-Fatihah through it
like kneading out pounds of dried out pigeon
pea daal dough from a forgotten forever ago
in the back of the basement fridge. I give CPR
to the flatlined, flavorless, inelastic plastic,
and in the sitting down for sujood and standing
back up, my leg muscles contract sluggishly
with date molasses on both sides of lipid bilayer
and the ion transfer takes eons to complete.

The will of the devil curdles in my blood
like cottage cheese, clumps of platelets and sick
sickle cells carrying only carbon and no breath

Breathless and heart beating slow, dragged, out,
beats like painful descent of sticky bolus swallowed,
I pray my Maghrib after p(r)aying dues for my slept-
through Asr, asking Allah, exalted be He, to untie
the knots in my tongue, by way of prayer of Moses.

“Rabbishrah lee sadree,
wa yassir lee amree,
wahlul ‘uqdatam-millisaanee…”

“My Lord! Uplift my heart for me,
and make my task easy,
and remove the impediment from my tongue…”

The state of my tongue is the state of my heart;

black like octopus ink soot stain
of doodh patti malai burnt to black crisp
in stainless steel saucepan left on high heat,

black like shifty stink-flies born of water-
logged baseboard and woodwork
from under-tile leak of kitchen pipework,

black like rusty sludge tears running down
peeling walls of basement stairs—

Oreo crud tears stream down Satan’s cheeks
as he laughs at my sorry state.

Only the Forgiver and Transformer of repenter’s
sin may wipe away from my heart these smears
and make round and robust my cells and turn
molasses to saline and dead gum to supple tongue.

The path to purity is abundantly clear—

“Subhana rabbiyal a’laa,
subhana rabbiyal azeem.”

“Exalted be my Lord Most High,
exalted be my Lord Most Grand.”

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Have your legs ever felt like they were full of molasses?
Maybe when you’re trying to pray witr before going to sleep?
Or when you wake up at 8am for calculus II and wish you could just skip school?