Blood Are Also Tears

By Danyal Kim

*thwak* *thwak*

 

That’s the sound

of a whole room full of grieving men

and women slapping their chests.

Pain is one unbroken rhythm

carried on for centuries.

Even some of the more macho men

will slap their chests with chains

when tears of the eyes aren’t enough

and blood from your skin can be tears, too.

 

*thwak* *thwak*

 

When you’re the only Shi’a Saudi woman

in a Facebook chat full of secular Europeans, Americans

and East Asians and you have the

monumental task of explaining how grownups

manage to cry over a man named Hussayn

who died over a thousand years ago.

When even mainstream Sunnis think that’s weird

and you’re in a chat group by yourself

struggling to translate a language that your people

don’t always use words to describe.

 

*thwak* *thwak*

 

Blood are also tears

you saw a Shi’a man shot in your home city

by an ISIS sympathizer

in an Eastern province of Saudi Arabia

and he cried bucket load of tears

through the hole in his head. Or when

a young Shi’a boy (a baby) cried through

his throat when a taxi driver cut it

with a shard of a broken glass.

 

*thwak* *thwak*

 

I am also a Shi’a Muslim 

not in Saudi, but in the USA.

I went to a university with a Pakistani man

who fled to the West, wanting to pray

away from snipers aiming at their mosque doors.

Even in Chicago, a boy told me once

a bunch of Sunni kids locked a Shi’a girl in a room

at a party as a prank.

A different friend of mine

who I went to University with told me an angry Sunni

kicked his tor’ba stone across the room,

the circular clay stones Shi’as rest their foreheads on.

Hussayn’s name, inscribed on the stone, was

dragged across carpet and prayer mats.

Anti-Shi’ism was just a thing some people

brought with everywhere, packed in their suitcases,

across time zones, across oceans.

 

By day, Danyal Kim works at an government agency. By night he writes poetry about his experiences of being a Muslim in Chicago.