Читать книгу Shades of Islam - Rafey Habib - Страница 14

Reading the Qur’an

Symbols, stood in the still light;

Will not be understood

As words, signs for

Things. Their wisdom shapes

The sounds they fill

From a deeper source than shrill

Persuasion. They call to deeds but

Also to silence, whose depth reaches

Beneath recitation

Through long centuries,

Exegesis, back to the voice of

Man, treading desert sand,

Listening to voices higher than all the

Words within, around his world.

These symbols call to all the

Forces of reading: book more

Than book, whose signs

Are more than words, opening into

Worlds of self, struggle, silhouetted

Against fading of night, opening

Into red of distance;

Their voices flow, in meaning

Shivering through many realms,

Past and future,

Whose movement cannot

Be stilled; voices whose life

Might not be stifled, in schools,

Be killed in codes and ghosts of

Rules, of literal reading:

Symbols, whose sounds

Are more than meaning.