The Heart’s Reflection

People whose hearts are like the heart of birds will enter Paradise

Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ [Saḥīḥ Muslim #2840]

The heart weeps, as though it has been flung into
Yūsuf (ʿalayhis salām)’s well of loneliness. Amidst the
empty depths of this murky life, the absence
of your presence, from this world of fleeting
shadows, pricks into my numbed consciousness.

Love of this dunya whirls around me like
the frenzied flapping of wings, while my heart
flounders in its own prism of passions.

Gazing at the starry veil of the night sky, 
the heart yearns to ascend, bird-like, into
the glowing silver of the misty moon:

“Oh! How I seek the musk-rose incense
of the sacred silence, that shall lead me
to my Paradisal abode!

The cup of my soul, once brimming purple
with selfish frivolities, now burns to
fracture from this lacquered life.

Ya Nabi al-Tawba!¹ I shall sojourn here, shedding tears of pith;
of snow and hail, in hopes to cleanse my black sides.”

¹ Translated as the Prophet of Repentance