John Agard

The Return of Perplexed Maimonides

An aroma’s throw from Cordoba’s olive trees

in the arms of Andalucia’s Moorish breeze,

sits the ghost of one Moses Ben Maimonides

contemplating this soul-bogglingly complex

web called life. Yes, he’s thinking to himself what next? 

Maybe I’ll modernise my Guide for the Perplexed.

A Jew writing of the perplexed in classical Arabic

(even a ghost) can perplex both ends of Orthodox stick.

The thing is to couch your words in the prophetic.

From Jerusalem to the seat of Damascus,

eagles of steel shall come swarming like locusts

and weeping shall sound from the stones and the dust.

Strike a sphinx-like tone, keep the believers guessing.

They’ll soon be falling at your feet for a blessing.

Failing that, turn to the art of jesting.

So say to the charity-givers, give without a fuss.

Let donors learn from the best poets among us.

In short, let your giving be anonymous.

Risk a beheading, at best a barrage of boos.

But that’s how believers express their views 

when they hear the truth told slantingly true.

Say to thy tongue, old Maimonides suggests,

say to thy tongue I don’t know, and thou shalt progress.

Then he crosses his Isaiah fingers while holding his breath.

Having no reason to disbelieve divine reason,

he thinks this too will come to pass – the fanatic’s season.

Then again how long is a piece of string, how long?

Some rabbis with beards as grey as their Torah

may regard this apparition as a heresy-sower –

a sort of crossover Biblical whistle-blower.

How trust a man who learns from whirling Sufis

and mixes God’s word with scientific theories

picked up from ones who face Mecca on their knees?

How can silence be prayer and darkness light?

How compare Jacob’s dream with Muhammad’s flight,

when no ladder’s the same as another, ain’t that right?

A rabbi like him of eagle-eyed renown

should be rooting for the messianic march of Zion.

Tell us, Maimonides, whose side are you on?

And he who by acronym was aka Rambam

would recall the golden age of medieval Islam

when Jew and Muslim breathed in one breath of Adam.

And he who was physician to the sultan of Cairo,

and neither considered the other as high or as low,

now contemplates on the telly – an inferno

rising from an apocalypse of breaking news.

But when bilingual bombs speak Arabic and Hebrew,

should he answer to Moses or Abu Musa ibn Maymun?

Ah, for those days beside Cordoba’s olives,

when the most perplexed mind knew the meaning of live.

And both rabbi and imam could spell forgive.

*

Ghost Under Surveillance

Ghosts, as we know, have their own sartorial sense,

so this time round (as a sort of theological joke)

I thought I’d don the Sufi’s woollen cloak,

swop my turban for a rabbi’s black fedora,

and feed the Koran with the spoon of the Torah.

So placing to my lips my trumpet of Joshua’s,

pausing between notes of messianic suras,

I did my impression of a whirling dervish.

City folk threw me coins, thinking I was homeless,

while some of the multitude cried heretic.

When word got out my nickname was Rambam,

they asked: ‘Is he of rabbi kin or a disguised imam?’

‘A physician of the soul,’ I Rambam replied.

So what if this body be a synagogue or a mosque?

Both East and West know blood’s alphabet of loss.

And so what if I pray three times a day, or five?

In the throat of silence God’s syllables thrive.

*

The Jester’s Eureka Moment

How do you fuse

a Muslim and a Jew into one?

is a question the jester

would many a day brood on

as he squatted on his futon.

At last – a win-win solution.

Since flesh dwelleth in the Word,

I’ll start by changing my name

to Abdul Abdullah Goldberg,

or simply Suleyman Solomon

and under my yarmulke dome

to holy Mecca I shall roam

seeking kaaba in kabbalah

as I do my salaam shalom

from dusk onto dawn.

May the mind’s credos be exiled

from the orchard of my heart.

And may Yahweh and Allah smile

as I whirl down the aisle

with my chosen gentile.

And when reckoning day comes

and this jester bursts into atoms

for being one of God’s scapegoats,

may yours truly be timely bombed,

not by one side, but by both.

And from folly’s ever-blossoming bed,

let wisdom regather itself bud by bud.

Of course, easier said than done,

when dogma wags the mind by the tail

and heart forgets the scent of the frail.

11 The Return of Perplexed Maimonides

13 Ghost Under Surveillance

14 Bundles of Omens 

15 I Come to Bring Not Peace but a Sword

16 Bandages

17 Maimonides Discourses on the One

18 The Jester’s Eureka Moment

19 The Jester’s Postwar Reflection

20 A Widow Speaks of Five

21 I Am the Bread of Life

22 The Jester’s Spoonful

23 Belated Letter from Maimonides to Richard the Lion Heart, explaining why he declined the offer to be the King of England’s Royal Physician

25 Maimonides Discourses on the Spiritual Perks of the Physician

27 Maimonides Discourses on the Almighty’s Lack of Tastebuds

28 Maimonides Discourses on the iPhone God

29 Maimonides Discourses on the Via Negativa

30 Maimonides Discourses on Prayer

31 The Jester Weighs his Words

32 Voice

33 Maimonides Discourses on Prophecy

34 The Jester’s Version of Jonah

35 Maimonides Discourses on the Commandments

36 The Jester Confronts the Almighty on Separating the Sheep from the Goat

37 Frog on the Brink

38 A Senior Moment

39 Maimonides Discourses on Figures of Speech

40 The Jester Embraces Etcetera

41 Maimonides Discourses on the Fifth of the Four Humours

42 The Jester Battles with Turning the Other Cheek

43 An Eye for an Eye and a Tooth for a Tooth?

44 Maimonides Discourses on Exercise

45 The Jester’s Alternative Gymnasium

46 The Jester Lectures on the Role of the Poet in Virtual Reality

47 Maimonides Discourses on Love at First Sight

48 Maimonides Discourses on the C-Word

49 The Jester Counts Every Day Blessed

50 Maimonides Discourses on the Gender Issue

51 The Jester Seeks a New Wife Synonym

52 The Jester Enters the Debate

53 Maimonides Discourses on Vanity Vanity All Is Vanity

54 The Jester’s Metaphysical Nursery Rhyme

55 Maimonides Discourses on the Messiah

56 The Adoration of Balthazar

57 The Jester Recalls How Frank Incense Met Myrrhtle

58 The Jester Unravels the Mortal Coil

59 The Jester’s Spin on the Quantum Leap

60 Maimonides Discourses on the Resurrection

61 Maimonides’ Afterlife Afterthoughts

'John Agard's first book since he finally won the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry is typically cosmopolitan, with one eye on the past and the other on the present...readers – especially schoolteachers and their pupils – tend to love his work... This thought-provoking, puckish, tender book will not disappoint them.' – Rory Waterman, Times Literary Supplement [on Travel Light Travel Dark]

‘John Agard's poetry is a wonderful affirmation of life, in a language that is as vital and joyous as we are able to craft it in the Caribbean, in spite of our history of distress’ – David Dabydeen

‘A unique and energetic force in contemporary British poetry, John Agard's poems combine acute social observation, puckish wit and a riotous imagination to thrilling effect' – Ben Wilkinson 

‘His poems are direct and arresting, playful, full of startling imagery, and are hilarious, passionate and erotic as often as they are political – often managing to be all these things at once – Maura Dooley 

‘The new poems create multiple entertaining voices, but they are also urgent fables for our time’ – Paula Burnett, Times Literary Supplement

‘A specialist in word trickery… Agard is one of our most consistent, culture-crossing spokesmen’ – Graeme Wright, Poetry Review.

‘One of the most eloquent contemporary poets…rich in literary and cultural allusion, yet as direct as a voice in the bus queue’ – Helen Dunmore, Observer