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This poem is taken from PN Review 47, Volume 12 Number 3, January - February 1986.

Two Poems Charles Boyle

SUBMISSION

The muezzin's recording booms
Allahu akbar, God is Great, and the lights
in the rooms go on and the market lights.

On hands and knees, a woman is praying
in front of her bedroom mirror; others
on the patch of littered grass
between the kiosk and the cinema.

On a damp autumn evening in London
with the rain just holding off
I go on watching, still awed
by that rigid precision that begins

even earlier than prayer - right foot forward
across the threshold, the shoes carried
in the left hand, the hand
for unclean uses, my writing hand.
 
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