for AA

When I’m triggered by your temper, I remember

Your neighbors desperate to find where you’d been

buried alive in rubble. They lifted you like a bloody doll

With its head broken open. When I see your scar, I lean

Into you, the miracle you are living. The imam you will be

Are yet my student knocking afterschool outside my routine.

Your fasting shamed my fatigue and shifted my mind

To my heart. I helped correct your grammar of a scene

Of your diaspora from Iraq to America. Your older brother

Almost made it until Feds suspected him in between

Syria and Turkey. The FBI invaded your tenth birthday,

Took him from your arms through a torn door screen.

FBI vans swallowed him behind iron as you wailed away.

You were dashed again to the ground as a broken figurine.

From your own rubble, as for any refugee your age,

The test of jihad is inside, where Allah alone shall intervene.

To fight outside is to have already lost the fight inside.

You opened my heart to what Islam means.

I too regard you as family, as a son. In Ramadan,

you welcomed me, to break the fast at sunset, to convene

With the men of your mosque. Here I am a sojourner

in response to the Lord of the Universe, Rab el Alameen.

Alongside you I bow to the light of all prophets,

to the Most Gracious, the All-Merciful One. Amen in Amin.