PLAYS FOR DAR
AL-ISLAM SCHOOL IN ABIQUIU,
NEW MEXICO
The Stonecutter's
Dream, 1988
"Once upon a time,
I mutter,
Lived a lady Stonecutter
Who worked at grueling
work all day
For long hours and puny
pay.
Her job: to cut stones
from a rock
With pick and hammer,
and to knock
Small stones into shapes
more like bricks
To make walls of houses,
thick
Or thin, or walls along
A road you might stroll
full of song.
But this stonecutter’s
moans
Reached the distant-most
ozones.
She wasn’t happy,
not at all,
She whined with every
pickax fall,
She swung and as her pickax
struck
She wailed and wheezed
like a pickup truck!"
• • •
The Setting Free of The Blind Princess of Zar, 1989
"Nothing that we
see is what it seems.
The things around us live
in blissful dreams.
This tunnel is the insides
of our lungs
with each breath climbing
as up ladder-rungs
from earth to sky, then
higher to the Throne
that we can never reach,
but just Allah alone
who bestows on us His
light--
that's what gives
us sight!"
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