My Connection To Islam Poem by Kimberly Burnham

In the sunny part of this morning
I sat meditating
for just a few minutes
in the Baha'i temple near Chicago

We bicycled 20 miles
from the synagogue floor
near the lake
where we slept last night
Hazon riders
a mobile community of Jews

And so I sat thinking
about my connection to Islam
in this beautiful sanctuary
filled with while light
and the sound of peace

Dreaming of living my life
in Rumi's field beyond
right thinking and wrong thinking
meeting the world there

Rumi, the Turkish Sufi poet
a mystic of Islam
perhaps my partner's
Jewish ancestors
walked in the same fields
and journeyed on the same roads
as this Islamic love poet

A world away
from Southeastern Asia
where Badshah Khan,
The Frontier Gandhi
was a Torch for Peace

The art of Islam
a show at my Alma Mater
Brigham Young University
starting with ancient broken plates
imagining how the pattern
continues into wholeness
ending with whole plates
their pattern intact
imagining how the pattern
could expand out into the universe

The memories came flood back
across 40 years an all the changing in my beliefs
when as a Christian tourist
I first sat in a Baha'i temple
in Haifa, Israel
just weeks before
the ‘73 Yom Kippur War