"First the knees give out" (Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore)

"First the knees give out" 
(Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore)



First the knees give out then the
ship’s rudder then the bank account then the canary cage
then Uncle Henry’s moustache then the tablecloth begins to
fray the chair falls apart doors fall off their hinges the
cows start speaking in tongues the
eyes blur our food turns back to its
origins in the earth or on the hoof
the sky itself begins to look old as it has
never before usually perennially adolescent or even
in its eternal baby-blue infancy
trees begin to produce purses full of play money
hills begin to growl like overheated engines as they
start their climb
everyone else looks positively glamorous in black and
white or color

and so it goes as time goes by

waving one moment from a quick window
or being the one waved to
as everything actually revolves around
time’s immovable pivot

water falling backwards into the awed mouth of the
river from which it flowed


"First the knees give out" by Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore appears in the 2007 collection Through Rose-Colored Glasses and online at his site Ecstatic Visions. Moore’s first book of poems, Dawn Visions, was published by City Lights Books in 1964. On his website the poet comments: William Blake, the most Sufic bard of our language (specifically English) often finds the energy of heaven and hell interchangeable, one with the light of the other, going to the source, as it were, of inspiration and visionary enlightenment (which is why I prefer William Blake to T.S. Eliot, because Blake understood with visionary immediacy the depths of Gnostic understanding. The Sufi poets, Rumi, Ibn Farid, Hafez would probably have found in Blake a true enlightened companion. Moore converted to Sufism in 1970; the Ecstatic Exchange Series is bringing out the extensive body of his poetry.  He has lived in Philadelphia since 1990.