I do not pray

on the emptiness of the sky

I have never been one to pray, I have always told my friends and loved ones that I feel the doors of the sky are closed to me, when in actuality, to me, the sky has always been empty.

As a child, I was raised in a religious environment but a spiritual household. My mother believing Al-Isra’ wal Mi’raj is a form of astral projection being a small but telling snippet of what she practices. But my environment in school and around extended family was always severely religious.

In school, I was taught that if I don’t have faith and if I don’t pray, not only will I go to hell, but so will my mother. I would go home and stay up all night in my room crying and begging to anyone who was listening not to send my mother to hell because the sky was so empty to me.

My mother tells me that when I was 3, I would thank Allah for the rain and the trees and the ground and the dirt while we were on our walk.

When I was six or so, some childhood family friend asked me if I prayed to Allah and how. I told them I didn’t know who Allah was. They were extremely shocked at this blasphemy and and sacrilege coming from me, immediately looking at my parents as the culprit of my lack of faith and therefore evil of a six year old. It was an extremely shameful moment in my six year old mind. I had brought shame upon our family with my ungodly impiousness.

When I grew older, and came more to terms with who I am, I stopped feeling so much shame about how empty the sky was to me. I had come to realize god to me was in little things and mostly within love. When I fell in love I came to knew a god of little things. God being the way a lover looks at me, the freedom of their laugh when I say things, the way my friends stay up all night psychoanalyzing each other. This was god to me.

Yesterday, my friend’s relative passed away. They asked me to keep their family in my prayers. I felt myself reaching, as I often do, to something. Because I felt guilt about having nothing to reach to I stopped reaching. I have always said that I believed in the universe and the god in little things, but in times of grief and desperation I feel nothing but alone.
Even still I have never felt godly in my life, I’ve never had that ultimate leap of faith that some of my friends seem to have or at some point in their life and childhood had. I’ve never had the fear of god. Even the nights crying about my mother going to hell were not stemming from a faith in the metaphysical, but a real fear of the unknown, and a threat from an older wiser person.

It’s not like I’ve never found beauty in the stories. The piety of the first word of the Qur’an being “Iqra’” (read), the sanctity of the wailing, dignified grief felt by Mary when her son died. The beauty of Sufism and the metaphysical aspects of Islam, compared to diving into a pool of deep water. The holiness felt in Khushu’ during prayer bringing grown people to tears of piety. After all these are people and their love and loss and life and seeking of faith is something so human. But that is all it was to me. Incredibly, heartbreakingly human.

In my life though, I have felt a deep divinity in love. To me, always, love was divine. In all of it’s frivolity and humanness, it was piety to me. My pen-name is Layla Qais, clearly I believe in the religiosity of love.

So with this I wrote this two-part poem, to someone I still love deeply:

To my Cesare Borges I

They say the portraits of Jesus we have today are based on Da Vinci’s lover Cesare

How fitting

This is love

Someone asks you to paint a portrait of God

and you paint your love

Heaven does not count

Unless

God looks like you//

Generations later

They will look at you, my love

and see you

how I see you

Generations later they will look at you

and see the face of God

In gift shops, and churches

On the back of pick-up trucks you’re stuck behind in traffic

there you are

My love: God

To my Cesare Borges II (A reprise)

I loved you so fiercely

you turned me to god

I loved you ferociously (the one with gnashing teeth)

I wanted to kneel in a silent cathedral

begging to something I know isn’t there

for you to be okay

I loved you so much

I loved you so much I put my face by hands on a prayer mat

and swore piety

I swore so much

I loved you so much

With Pious Love,

Layla Qais