Ramadan Pearls

Ramadan Pearls - Expectant

When it comes to material food, if you eat too little, you will remain hungry like the crow and suffer ill-temper and anemia; if you eat your fill, your body will incur the penalty of indigestion.

Partake of God’s food, that easily digested nutriment, and ride like a ship on the spiritual ocean.

Be patient and persistent in fasting, be always expecting the Food of God.

For God, who acts with goodness and is long-suffering, bestows His gifts on those who are expectant.

The full-fed man doesn’t wait expectantly for bread, wondering whether his allowance will come soon or later;

but the foodless man is always asking, “where is it?” and expecting it hungrily and seeking and searching for it.

Unless you are expectant, that bounty of manifold felicity will not come to you.

Ramadan Pearls - Reed

There’s hidden sweetness in the stomach’s emptiness.

We are lutes, no more, no less. If the soundbox

is stuffed full of anything, no music.

If the brain and the belly are burning clean

with fasting, every moment a new song comes out

of the fire.

The fog clears, and new energy makes you

run up the steps in front of you.

Be emptier and cry like reed instruments cry.

Emptier, write secrets with the reed pen.

When you’re full of food and drink, Satan sits

where your spirit should, an ugly metal statue

in place of the Kaaba. When you fast,

good habits gather like friends who want to help.

Fasting is Solomon’s ring. Don’t give it

to some illusion and lose your power,

but even if you have, if you’ve lost all will and control,

they come back when you fast, like soldiers appearing

out of the ground, pennants flying above them.

A table descends to your tents,

Jesus’ table.

Expect to see it when you fast, this table

spread with other food, better than the broth

of cabbages.