From: The Chronicles of Akhira

by Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore

They Came Down from the High and Low Places
they threaded themselves along
through the intricate threadings,
the ancient ones and the new ones,
all the famous were among them,
all the shining stars,
all the historical glory-grabbers, the great thieves,
all the inventors with their psychological quirks,
the nobodies came as well, the flowing multitudes of the
anonymous,
the endless dissatisfied housewives, authoritative
bureaucrats,
gas-station attendants and couples with no children,
philanthropists and the workaholics,

they came through the sandy pass,
faces were indistinguishable, differences unnoticed,
naked they came and assembled,
fear for their own state kept their eyes on the ground,
they came and made ranks,
the noble and notable next to the hardened criminal
the saint in his glow next to the shrew in her
darkness,

all the Chinese came, all the Australian Aborigines,
some who had never been clothed came,
and some who had never been out of them,
important socialites were bereft of their diamonds,
the scholar with references bereft of his briefcase,
the sinking or rising of the pan
with the light or heavy scales registering
the forever of the moments
lengthened out now along a line
visible from the beginning to the end of each life
like a straight narrative, or a string with knots in it.

No flaws in the universe,
and the universal memory has no lapses.
Each midget or giant of sensibility and care
came to the jamboree
at the beginning of Eternity
and wondered in its echoes
what its final fate would be.

Section I from Chronicles of Akhira, by ‘Abd al-Hayy Moore; Zizal Press, 1986. Reprinted from

, Winter 1992

Originally published in the Winter 1993 print edition of