When Gates Remain Shut Poem by Mohammad Younus

The call to prayer unravels at dawn's edge—
a broken thread in the sky's taut silence.
Iron gates lock their jaws,
straining against what they cannot hold:
the tide of foreheads seeking earth,
a thousand whispered Ameens,
braiding air into something holy.

The Eidgah hums with emptiness.
Stones commit to memory
the absence of bare feet,
the weight of prostrations left unmade.
No cloth rustles against cloth,
no child's laughter tumbles
between the takbirs.
Only the wind kneels now,
pressing its unseen prayer into the dust.

Tell me, what fractures a ruler's spine
when he fears the curve of a back in worship
more than the arc of a drawn sword?
What calculus deems a bowed crowd a threat
but a mob with torches a passing storm?

Listen: faith has always been a fugitive.
It needs no dome, no minaret's golden throat.
It slips through barred doors—
a scent of musk, a whisper on worn pages.
It lives in the fixing of eyes toward Mecca,
in fingers tracing silent tasbeeh in light and darkness,
in a mother's lullaby, shaped
by the breath of Ayatul Kursi.

So let the gates stay shut.
The prayer has already grown wings—
circling in the hawk's slow flight,
twisting in roots beneath the fence,
shimmering in the mute cry of a muezzin's shadow,
stretching toward the qibla of the sun.
No lock was ever made
for the silence after Allahu Akbar,
for the way it echoes—boundless,
in the chest of the world.

MyKoul