Gathered
Daniel Thomas Dyer
Who were you,
dear messenger,
in the Ulu Cami Mosque,
surrounded
by the Names
of God
gathered
on the walls?
Kneeling in zhikr,
I felt your hand
on my shoulder,
your gravelly
Turkish
(I didn’t understand)
whispered
in my ear.
You looked
like a grandfather
I’d once drawn,
with your short, white beard
and your warm touch
of Jonah.
I’ve wondered since
if others saw,
or if you stepped
from the imaginal,
fresh from a meeting
with Khidr.
More likely flesh
and blood
like me,
you simply wanted
an ear
to pour out
a long-fermented,
bubbling
ecstasy,
soothing as
the fountain
of the mosque.
You didn’t care
if I understood
or not,
pointing
a finger—
and a smile—
to the One.
Daniel Thomas Dyer is an author, musician, publisher, and regular blogger at Rumi’s Circle. He is a dervish in the Mevlevi Order founded on the wisdom of Mevlana Jaluluddin Rumi, under the guidance of Shaikh Kabir and Camille Helminski. His first book was ‘The 99 Names of God’, a family guide for all ages. God willing, his next book will be ‘The Mystic Keats’, exploring Keats’ poetry in the light of Rumi and Sufism. He is the publishing manager for Threshold Books and provides freelance publishing services through Chickpea Press. He’s released two albums of music under the name Dantom – ‘Root of the Root’ and ‘Remember’ – and, God willing, will soon release a third, called ‘Seen & Unseen’.
This poem won first prize in the inaugural Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore Ecstatic Poetry Competition. You can listen to it being recited by the poet in the award ceremony replay, along with other winning entries and shortlisted poems.
Speaking at the award ceremony, poet and judge Medina Tenour Whiteman said of this poem,
“The poem itself is very visual which is one of the things I loved about it – it really puts you into that place and makes you have that experience – it’s almost like a multi-sensory replica of a real moment in time… Really it was like you close your eyes and are just taken somewhere else… That is the beauty of a really powerful poem… it has that bubbling sense of ecstasy in it, but it’s contained. That’s what I felt… out of all the poems that were entered it had that balance of the ecstasy that’s encapsulated within a poem, within a story, within a place, within a location, within an experience.”
Judge Sukina Noor described this poem in the following way:
“I was there – that’s the only way I can describe my experience of that poem – I literally felt like I was in that moment, in that masjid, the Turkish man was talking to me… I was really centred in that poem.”
Look out for the upcoming chapbook of the longlisted, shortlisted and winning entries of the 2025 Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore Ecstatic Poetry Competition to be published by Lote Tree Press.
