call to prayer

I am sitting in the world's first breath.
Five times a day, we all breathe together, and this is the first.
















We're in my favorite place.
A place of pattern.
cobblestone lines racing beneath my crossed legs jump into a fence
and the ancient cityscape beyond it.
The fence is white and checkerboard,
the valley is a soup of vectors and a horizon that is always dusty and faded
history's housetops run northward until they melt into sunflowers and olive trees

Breathing.
we've grown up on fresh
air
but here it breaks from the lungs of a Muslim man in an unnamed tower before its ours to inhale.
lets call him grandfather.

You can taste his patterns of sound,
they are woven together like straw hats.
Grandfather has a city to watch over, men and women to guide home through their streets on pilgrimage to bow at the waist and bow to the ground;
many times, daily, to prayer.

Allah.
voices from the minarets
are trumpets
they are proud
like opera singers
they are echoing from there to here on the hill where I sit, listening.
they are
many voices coloring the air, drops of water falling together
until they are swimming together
in our blood and waking up college students at 4:30 and at 12 and at 3:30 and at 5:50 and at 7 and we forget its there
like the air we breathe.

This is one time, today.
I pick it up like a bookmark
to remind me where I am.