And then there are Angels

And then there are angels

And then there are angels
who come in the form of devils
advocating for Allah,
yet they speak in the voice of Satan
thou Allah is in their heart
they test the believer for Allah
is he true to the cause
does he truly believe
let us test him
challenge his faith
will he submit to me or Allah
Ah, he is a believer
His life and death are all for Allah!
We tell him to construct buildings for Allah
he rejects us
We tell him to kill in the name of Allah
he rejects us
The man of faith says Allah is a state of mind
not buildings, institutions, shrines, mosques
What is a building when there is nothing in the heart
it is a shell, the man a corpse of living matter
how shall a building benefit him
how shall fellowship keep his faith
he is a dead man walking
following the green line to the chamber.
--m
6/4/10

from Sweet Tea/Dirty Rice, poems, by Marvin X, Black Bird Press, Berkeley, late 2010.
$19.95, pre-publication price $15.00 (includes priority mailing).

X’s poems vibrate, whip, love in the most meta- and physical ways imaginable and un-. He’s got the humor of Pietri, the politics of Baraka, and the spiritual Muslim grounding that is totally new in English –- the ecstasy of Hafiz, the wisdom of Saadi. It’s not unusual for him to have a sequence of shortish lines followed by a culminating line that stretches a quarter page –- it is the dance of the dervishes, the rhythms of a Qasida.
--Bob Holman, Bowery Poetry Club, New York City