Daniel AbdalHayy Moore

Daniel AbdalHayy Moore Poems

Daniel AbdalHayy Moore Biography

Born in 1940 in Oakland, California, Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore’s first book of poems, Dawn Visions, was published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Books, San Francisco, in 1964, and the second in 1972, Burnt Heart/Ode to the War Dead. He created and directed The Floating Lotus Magic Opera Company in Berkeley, California in the late 60s, and presented two major productions, The Walls Are Running Blood, and Bliss Apocalypse. He became a Sufi Muslim in 1970, performed the Hajj in 1972, and lived and traveled throughout Morocco, Spain, Algeria and Nigeria, landing in California and publishing The Desert is the Only Way Out, and Chronicles of Akhira in the early 80s (Zilzal Press) . Residing in Philadelphia since 1990, in 1996 he published The Ramadan Sonnets (Jusoor/City Lights) , and in 2002, The Blind Beekeeper (Jusoor/Syracuse University Press) . He has been the major editor for a number of works, including The Burdah of Shaykh Busiri, translated by Hamza Yusuf, and the poetry of Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, translated by Munir Akash. He is also widely published on the worldwide web: The American Muslim, DeenPort, and his own website and poetry blog, among others: www.danielmoorepoetry.com, www.ecstaticxchange.wordpress.com. He has been poetry editor for Seasons Journal, Islamica Magazine, a 2010 translation by Munir Akash of State of Siege, by Mahmoud Darwish (Syracuse University Press) , and The Prayer of the Oppressed, by Imam Muhammad Nasir al-Dar’i, translated by Hamza Yusuf. In 2011 he was a winner of the Nazim Hikmet Prize for Poetry. The Ecstatic Exchange Series is bringing out the extensive body of his works of poetry, of which there are thirty-two titles as of June,2011.)

The Best Poem Of Daniel AbdalHayy Moore

Noah's Music

Prophet Noah fell in love with rain

Its pounding on the ark roof struck his
heartbeats like a tuning fork

Its white watery streaks coming down from a
black sky womb in incessant sheets

The joy of all those aquatic animals and
water birds the silly penguins and
sleek torpedo seals and weasels

God’s Voice-waves audible in lengthy water music
This absolute deed of His inundation visible

The heavens’ rhythms and mirrored constant
bobbing under the boat’s bow in cordial syncopation

Cascades spouting off the sides
out divinely inspired flues and drainpipes
like flared silvery wings

as he headed from one squall to
another down unfolding corridors of rainfall draperies
blacker than velvet toward no

certain light nor surcease of flood except what
he’d been promised and was

being promised with every rain-beat

His heart out there on the mast like
Odysseus’s later ears stopped up and manacled past
the shipwrecking sirens’ incessant magnetic song

But Noah’s heart a tympani for
rain mallets hitting deeper sounds

Forty days and forty nights of aquatic fury
each dropp a direct hookup to God’s perfect purposes

Each animal eyeball in the dark trained on the
colossal chaos of water and yet
sweetly calm in their pure diurnal concentration

Noah at the helm letting
God be captain

each driven dropp that much closer to His
actual Action in the world

The shroud of sky itself an illumined birth canal
Noah’s boat slid out of at last

washed utterly clean in
earth’s new dispensation

remembering God’s Names forever in the
hammering water drops and crashing waves’

compassionate collisions

(6/28/2007 from In the Realm of Neither)

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