The light arrives unseen like a whispered rumour.

slow suffusion through the Atlas foothills

Deeply embracing orchards of pomegranate, orange, fig, olive, and proud cypress.

The mountain breaths between inaudible intimations,

Its sound moves through the foothill grasses

Which lean and prostrate in the way of believers

toward something they cannot name.

And the sound of the mourning dove becomes a prayer echoing through the hills.

—

Far from the spotless roads of tourist convoys,

The dusty trails through dusty forgotten villages remember their origin

the slow press of caravans out of Africa

out of Mali through the heart of the Sahara,

gold counted before watchful eyes, salt weighed against it,

moving northward toward the colossus of Marrakech.

Solemnly passing the Kasbah of Ait Benhaddou, ten centuries settled

into its hillside like words lodged in the throat of time,

its kasbah is smeared with dark earth: black dirt, black clay carved into a black fortress.

A lone sentinel watching the trade route etched into the very sand.

Along which empires emerged and crumbled

—

Hesiod saw a god here first.

Ovid agreed.

They pressed a name onto these peaks

that were nameless well before antiquity.

Atlas, the Titan at the rim of the known world,

sentenced to carry the sky on his shoulders

so that the rest of life might live.

The truths of geological causation cannot capture the wonder

That Perseus, son of Zeus, lifted Medusa’s severed head

those petrifying eyes turned toward

a face already made of stone?

Or had these mountains always been

that myth’s conclusion, the skull

made into summit, the anguish

folded into limestone over eons

until it became something beautiful

and indifferent and permanent?

No one answered.

The gods grew quiet, the way gods do

when a more insistent voice arrives.

 

The shrill cry of the muezzin’s call.

On the morning of Eid El Adha,

A call that unspools across the dusty villages,

•  light draped like linen
• every hill and minaret and crumbling wall,

and it does not ask — it announces:

• that sacrifice is the oldest grammar,
•  Abraham raised his knife
• The ram is in the thicket
• The only witness, the high Atlas.
• grasses bend again
• orange trees do not move.
• The light, still arriving, says nothing
• And means even less by its silences