Pilgrim Bell

My savior has powers and he needs.
To be convinced to use them.
Up until now he has been.
A no-call no-show. Curious menace.
Like a hornet’s nest buzzing.
On a plane’s wing. Savior. Younger than.
I pretend to be. Almost everyone is.
Younger than I pretend to be. I am a threat.
Even in my joy. Like a cat who. Playing kills.
A mouse and tongues.
It back to life. The cat lives.
Somewhere between wonder.
And shame. I live in a great mosque.
Built on top of a flagpole.
Whatever happens happens.
Loudly. All day I hammer the distance.
Between earth and me.
Into faith. Blue light pulls in through.
The long crack in my wall. Braids.
Into a net. The difference between.
A real voice and the other kind.
The way its air vibrates.
Through you. The way air.
Vibrates. The violence.
In your middle ear.

Kaveh Akbar, poet and novelist, was born in Tehran in 1989, and was taken to the United States at the age of two. You can read an interesting personal response to his work in the journal Ploughshares, including some thoughts about his most recent collection Pilgrim Bell – in which you can find this poem of the week.

In an epigraph, Akbar cites a quotation from Hadith 4: 438, in which Al-Harith bin Hisham asks the Prophet how divine inspiration is revealed to him. The Prophet replies: “Sometimes it is like the ringing of a bell.” The poet-pilgrim’s winding quest across internal landscapes neither wholly secular nor sacred, is punctuated at intervals by six eponymous but different poems. Each chime of the bell seems both to record a sharpening and a complication of the pilgrim’s vision. The particular Pilgrim Bell poem I’ve chosen seems particularly encrusted with contradictions.

Even the securely holy concept “My savior” is called in for questioning. The lower-case s rules out the Christian meaning of “savior”: nor is it one of the Names of Allah as usually enumerated. The implication might be that the speaker’s “savior” is some earthly benefactor. The latter could still, of course, be posited as a medium of divine inspiration, and the poem a meditation on the nature of Allah and the human self, the poet-speaker-pilgrim.

Studded with full-stops, the poem refuses to mean what the hasty reader might think it means. It may even be a parable about the way the human mind constructs the deity and the texts which define “his” activity. Simple answers soon become questions. Has the deity been “convinced” to use their powers, are they a “no-call no-show”, or, somehow, both of these? Who is the cat and who the mouse in the playing-killing allegory?

Thanks to the full-stop after “wing” in line six, Savior is now capitalised. But the surrounding images hardly settle this being who is “Younger than./ I pretend to be. Almost everyone is./ Younger than I pretend to be…” The stop-start device works uncannily well if the line “I pretend to be. Almost everyone is.” stands alone as a pair of existential statements.

Against the constant breaking of syntax the reader does instinctive repair-work, building little bridges of convenient logic. Oppositions can meet, and may form an ebullient relationship: “I live in a great mosque./ Built on top of a flagpole.” But the constant narrative resistance in the poem signifies the difficulty not so much of making sense of a multilayered reality, as that of making sense of mystical experience. A bell doesn’t have grammar. To distinguish between a “real voice and the other kind” the mystic might have to force themselves to be innocent of language altogether, linguistic skill being no help in interpreting the unspeakable.

One of the clearest statements, “All day I hammer the distance”, might indicate the auditory and metaphysical effects of the repeated full-stopping. In another poem, the speaker concludes “God’s word is a melody, and melody requires repetition./ God’s word is a melody I sang once then forgot.” The re-creation of the melody might seem far from the current poem’s procedure. Nevertheless, it succeeds, through vibration and violence, in squeezing a chime from the bell’s “real voice” – a voice which, independent of the logic of English grammar, begins to encrypt the renewed idea of divine contact.