Hard to Escape

I've put away my books on Muhammad and the Koran, and I'm back to reading a book of poetry - Belonging, by Dick Davis. It turns out that he's a professor of Persian literature at Ohio State.

My favorite of his poems, so far, is In the Restaurant. As it opens, it describes an older woman, a "queen in exile" who rules over an extended family at a lively restaurant meal. The poet says she seems to embody "all that's customary, tribal, stable."

Then he gives you the background:

'Who, seeing this plump matriarch, could guess

That thirty years ago she'd risked her life

To cross Beirut's bomb-cratered no man's land,

Defying anguished parents, to say "Yes"

And be an unbeliever's outcast wife,

Careless of who'd condemn or understand?'

I love that.

Amusingly, we are brought back to matters Islamic.

I meant to put it behind me,
But here is this poem to remind me.