the Gift

أَعُوذُ بِٱللَّهِ مِنَ ٱلشَّيۡطَٰنِ ٱلرَّجِيمِ، بِسْمِ اللهِ الرَّحْمٰنِ الرَّحِيْمِ

i must write for you my Gift, 

for your absence weighs on my soul, 

like the Riemann sum of every pain

that my life has ever known.

there was a time in years past,

where your face i could not envision,

i had to touch your cheek,

to truly be sure you did exist.

but now, after a handful of years,

in the absence of you,

i can see your face, recall your scent,

remember nearly everything 

that you might have said.

this is not simply one person's absence,

or even that of one beloved, 

it's equal to the totality 

of being absent every soul 

that i may have ever touched.

do you know of what i fathom?

how your gaze gave me strength?

how i became a better father,

because first you were our Sunlight's mother?

how long must i miss your kiss,

the opening of blouses,

to reveal my most treasured Haven,

a bosom for my head to rest in,

and my tongue to know bliss?

you became the ideal that you sought,

those words that upon me you spoke,

in the year of my greatest trial,

it was how you sought to ease my road.

i did not think it possible, for it to happen truly,

that our such strangeness 

could ever be so utterly overcome

and with your heart, in this life,

would i come to know again: resonance.

alhamdulillah, though my Rabb in this prose

i mention slightly late,

His place in my tale, and how it wove,

is truly in every place.

not least of all forgetting, how it is He fashioned

one like me, to miss one like her:

two bodies so foreign in origin,

now orbit one another

like two stars, each born in the other's arms.