poems: Bushra Rehman

Masjid Alfalah

The minar and dome of our masjid
took longer to grow than trees.
Our fathers bought the land, then tilled it.
Before that, it was a parking lot
for the Jehovah’s Witness.
They sold it when the door to door
wasn’t bringing in the donations.

Our fathers sowed the seeds then
Qurans and janamazes. In all my years
from when I was four to sixteen,
the walls went up, and then the dome grew
the same pace my breasts did.

The minar too, grew from a little baby penis
to reach the heights of the Queens sky,
push up past the telephone lines,
let itself poke up, respectful still of
the Episcopalian church steeple next to it,
the flat brick surface of the kingdom
of the Jehovah’s Witness.

It was fine real estate for religion
on National street, a church,
a kingdom and a masjid,
crammed next to each other,
wall to wall, skin to skin.

And if you crossed the street
there was a Catholic store
selling crucifixes and paintings
of women and men in hell burning.
The sinners looked like all of us,
but I always thought that all of us
in our agony looked like Jesus.

Note: Masjid Alfalah was the first Sunni masjid built in New York City. It was founded by working-class Pakistani immigrants in Corona, Queens.

My Aba’s Masjid

These days there are fish who swim in and out of my Aba’s masjid.
The river runs slow and deep, and there are boats that run in the sky like air.

The ground where my ancestors’ foreheads touched in prayer has turned
into the sound of water, the sound of air, has been absorbed by the silence
of the fish, coated on the rocks at the bottom of the river bed.

Where my mother came a shaking bride, where the women combed out their hair,
there are strands of grasses and seaweed, rocks that lay and roll like boulders
where my father played in the trees.

These days there are fish who swim in and out of my Aba’s masjid.
The river runs slow and deep and all the bones of my ancestors
have risen to the surface to knock and click like the sounds of trees in the air.

Note: In 1974, Pakistan built the Tarbela dam, displacing 120 villages and 96,000 Pakistani villagers.

BUSHRA REHMAN was a vagabond poet who traveled for years with nothing more than a greyhound ticket and a bookbag full of poems. She is co-editor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism (Seal Press) and has been featured on BBC Radio 4, KPFA, the Brian Lehrer Show and in The New York Times, India Currents and NY Newsday. Her work has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Sepia Mutiny, Color Lines, Mizna, Curve, SAMAR and in numerous anthologies.