Knocking From Inside Poems

KNOCKING FROM INSIDE, BY TIEL AISHA ANSARI, is the journey of the human soul towards the Divine approached through a number of doorways: sorrow, the natural world, and the listening heart. We travel through both real and illusionary lands to (re)join the Beloved at the end of all paths. "When Tiel says 'God' she means it, in all her various ways and fresh poetic stratagems, in these poems in which there are many strata, and in this book which contains many gems." - Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore

.".".The look of love death has on its face and in its fathomless eyes as behind the burning irises legions upon legions of angels file up and down a spiraling staircase carrying love-notes and bringing back blessings and reprieves..."" I'm really not sure why this particular collection of my poems is called Blood Songs, the title it has had since beginning the first poem of the book written in October of 2000, and though, as with other titles of mine, not necessarily threading a theme throughout, yet the title stands notwithstanding... and so it stands.

A Hundred Little 3D Pictures started out from those once-popular computer generated images a certain stare, unfocused or crosseyed, could render in layered three dimensions, with some really astonishing results... Recall the excitement in childhood when we looked into a diorama and saw back and back past whatever was being portrayed, not very far back really, perhaps, maybe only a shoebox length back, but peering through the front hole with the little flashlight or christmas bulb illuminating it, we saw a wee world that gave us shivers of delight.

This is a series of imagistic and light-drenched poems written each day or night of the fast of Ramadan, 2011, here presented in consecutive order as they came. Their purpose: to get nearer...

There are among us luminous beings who maintain that what we might taste of the Garden of Paradise and what we might suffer of the Fire of Hell is right here in our present earthly and mortal existence as well. The imaginal truth of the Spiritual Path that points to the Next World after death is perhaps indisputable (however some might vigorously dispute it) but our lives, upon reflection, sometimes thrown overboard and barely making it to shore, sometimes buoyed up very high and slammed down very low and hard, are a living proof of the this-world tasting of the Next World experience...

MILLENNIAL PROGNOSTICATIONS: This is not a book of poetic futuristics, oracle-like I-Ching countings or consciousness Tarot readings, nothing so formal nor formulated. Perhaps its "prognostication" aspect is in trying to be open-hearted and sense-aware of images and their meanings, or meanings and their images, as they occur in the world both most immediate to us and by extension universal and even cosmic, detail by detail, focusing on what Blake called "minute particulars." It's a kind of lengthy prayer with sidebars, digressions and returns, hopefully each time more earnestly to the Source of all and of Whom, as it was said by the Prophet Muhammad, peace of Allah be upon him, "Do not curse time, for time is Allah..."

I'm not sure why anyone would want to undergo spiritual training, the rigors and difficulties of a path of spiritual discipline, except to reach a state of enlightenment. And I'm not sure that the state of enlightenment would be one of grim survival, or a harsh stoicism after all the exhausting rigors, but rather a joyful and constant perception of the simultaneous multifariousness of all things, and the single Divine core around which we all endlessly circulate'¦ The Perfect Orchestra of the Real. This world's natural light is supernatural light, and even when shining on the discordant, radiates calm, back to the central chord, the tonally harmonic resolution that laps throughout the universe as well as through us, end to end, and back again.

IN THE REALM OF NEITHER: I had a dream just before waking of a shelf filled with books, and I was reading the titles when a spotlight hit the spine of one book that also seemed to protrude from the others and be coming out of the shelf toward me. On it were the words "In the Realm of Neither" that remained vivid and unforgettable upon waking... (poem) If all the wood in the world were to sing/and every rose gave a political speech/and every cloud took pity on its neighbor/and every stone composed an epic poem about/being a stone and each of us saw God direct with our/own eyes in naked vision/as clearly as we see ourselves stooping to/drink from a lake.