Memoir of a Silent Friday

nothing broke the silence yesterday only the unsteady sprinkle of rain, blown by wind this way and that, making music that we could sweetly sing, calling us to prayer at the central mosque the cleric did not remind us, as usual of Idi Amin’s days that were ugly as the bowels of a rabbit or about Bin Laden’s jihad, he spoke instead about the bridge over Jahannam that life conceals and death makes us cross, the bridge narrower than a spiderweb and sharper than a sword, where the wicked lose their footing and are plunged into the fires beneath

at midnight, my silence was again shattered by horrors nestling in the pages of Grandpa’s news bulletin—a lifeless man who lay prostrate, flat like a flying carpet a drowned Syrian child washed up on Turkish shores the dying gasps of many refugees clinging to the sides of their rubber boats breathing agony digging hope but unearthing emptiness pleading with death to spare them the torture of being pulled across the bridge over Jahannam because the dead do not really die they pass swiftly across the bridge over Jahannam.