If I Must Warship A God Poem by Monzer Masri

(To Fatima Roshan)

*
If I must choose a God
To warship and serve
My grandmother's God
Whom she use to send along with me,
Wherever I went,
And charge him to guard me
Wherever I go
And command him to send me
a world
More kind to me even than she
…
Is my God.
One day I worshiped Fire
And one day I worshiped an Idol
And one day I worshiped a leader
And one day I worshiped a woman
And one day I worshiped
…
Nobody
Then I had no choice
But to lower my head
When my grandmother said:
' It's better for you
To put your life
In the hand of God
Than to put it
In the hand of men'.
My grandmother's God is my God
Who used to offer me
A sweet pomegranate on a plate,
And advise me not to let,
a one seed of it,
Drop on the floor of the house,
Because God
Put in every pomegranate
one seed from paradise
And when my uncle gathered the remains
Of my grandfather in a nylon sack
And transport them on his motorcycle
From the eastern cemetery,
Where the railway station sat up,
To his new grave,
Alongside the wall of THE-Moroccan's Mosque,
She said:
'God bless his soul
He was destined
To ride the motorcycle behind one
of his children.
He is who says to us:
'Praying is better than sleeping'
Praying and nothing more
Then leaves us dreaming.
Who tells us not to commit this
And that
But if we have to
It's all right
And if we committed a sin,
Once, twice, and three times;
Even if we spent all our life
Sinning
And at the last moment
Reverted and asked him forgiveness,
He accepts.
Who doesn't need the world,
Although he is the one who created it,
And carried its complete burden.
Whose only purpose
Like a real lover is
To be loved
Alone, without sharing
anybody else.
\
Who, my grandmother sat to read
His book,
And began to murmur AL-Kursi verse
While she was turning
after each word
A page
Of Surat AL-Baqara.
But he heard and
understood
And pleased.
I told her:
Do you know my grandma,
That two third of the human body
is water?
She said: no
It is
Tears..
___________________________7/7/1987