Love is a Traveller and We are its Path – Poetry Book

In this collection of poems, British-American poet Medina Tenour Whiteman attempts to resolve the tangledness of Western Muslim existence, casting a Sufi lens onto London night buses and childbirth, dhikr and plants, fasting and grief. As for resolution, these poems find peace in the paradox:

Instead of looking for my needs out on
savannahs of plain cloth, I looked
into the emptiness within to catch
a heartfelt of that Light and then
the landscape fell quite smooth,
caught diamonds as they thundered
from the sky. Those are
the grains that form as Light contracts
upon our atmosphere, the mirrored discs
we sew upon our dress to make like
we're that night, here are our stars,
to spin our skirts and get tangled again
instead of staying still and owning nothing.

This is the night. We are its stars.