Sickness

Today, I am making soup

because Tajit, the new imam

is coughing his head off and rolling on his mat at home.

You might wonder that I, a dervish,

Would be concerned for the imam,

But that is because you don’t understand me.

I love our imams, I really do.

Unlike the widows, though, I don’t believe

They can fly to Jerusalem on winged horses over night.

They are just men, like myself.

They struggle with the same desires,

and wrestle against the same nafs.

They fail just as regularly,

sin just as badly

speak just as foolishly as any of the rest of us.

Let the widows praise them in voices that rival the muezzin,

And let the merchants dismiss them as hypocrites,

but Najat knows the truth about imams:

Sin is a sickness

that sweeps through every village as regularly as rain in winter.

Even the imams catch cold now and again.