Dua for Dervishes by Michael Cirelli - Reading for this Eid

Eid Mubarak folks! This morning I woke up and read new poetry from Rattle and this poem was very moving.

https://rattle.com/dua-for-dervishes-by-michael-cirelli/

Michael CirelliDua for Dervishes

The crests of his dress
In 3s like sets of waves,
An O on the stage, a groove
Ground by soft leather soles
O perfect circle etched!
O spinning cipher human planet!
O the body void! O null.
Everything the Sufi does
Is for the love of Allah I’m told.
But when the dance was over
He came out smoking a Marlboro
In a cheap pleather jacket
And knockoff Nikes.
His hair flopped limp
On his forehead with each
Overextended inhale.
O the disappointment
As he scrolled on his smartphone,
Earbuds clogging his head
With Katy Perry I now suspect.
O Facebook for the love of Allah!
O fake Nikes for the love of Allah!
O iPhones O iTunes O iClouds
Overhead for the love of Allah.
Roar for the love of Allah!
I ran into my accountant halfway
Around the world that night,
My accountant for the love of Allah.

The poem begins with a Sufi dancer—spinning, sacred, almost cosmic. The kind of image we like to associate with devotion. A body becoming a circle, a human turning into something beyond himself. But then the dance ends.

The guy unexpectedly steps outside, lights a cigarette, scrolls on his phone, earbuds in, wearing knockoffs—completely ordinary. He’s even listening to Katy Perry. Which made me smile. I guess in the reverent it may feel like a a small disappointment, as if the sacred has slipped.

By the end of the poem, we are finding everyone—even an accountant—“for the love of Allah.”

Maybe the point isn’t that the sacred disappeared. Maybe it’s that we were expecting it to look a certain way: clean, elevated, separate.

Which brings me to what I have been meditating on this week. Maya. This is maya—the illusion that the divine lives only in the perfect moment, the perfect person, the perfect posture. Guru Amardas says, “maya viche paya” — what is beyond illusion is found within it. The love of God is discovered through the love of His gifts, welcome and unwelcome.

Those who are praying are human too. They are not finished beings. They are not pure symbols. They are people—smoking, scrolling, stumbling, singing pop songs—still trying to find Allah in the noise, in the mess, in the middle of their lives.

And maybe that is the prayer. To find what is beyond counting in the counting. To glimpse the infinite even in an accountant. To realize that nothing has fallen away— only our idea of what the sacred should look like. And once that illusion loosens, everything begins again “for the love of Allah.” 



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