Daniel Abdal-Hayy Moore

THE MUSIC SPACE, written in 2001, is a series of poems most acutely attuned to the sounds of our universe, composed for the most part while traveling back and forth to New York, unexpectedly ending with the world-transforming events of 9/11, completing in an apocalyptic way an unforeseen circle. This is the music space where music is most difficult this place of joy and horror... I think the music of the spheres can be heard in this space... And the original sound is the sound of God alone audible to Himself and we are the humming elements of that sound...

UNDERWATER GALAXIES is a book of poems in the floating genres of open inspiration and Rumiesque narrative, taking a journey to Morocco, visiting Marrakech, being visited by William Blake in vision...golden bees, yellow roses...the long and winding road from the divine affirmation of our birth to the double affirmation of death and its afterlife, all its twists and turns made sweeter by serious (and often humorous) imaginal utterance.

THE FLAME OF TRANSFORMATION TURNS TO LIGHT is a book of poems in traditional ghazal form, the first half begun in Turkey, companion volume to "open form" poems written at a later visit, published in 2006 as Love is a Letter Burning in a High Wind (The Ecstatic Exchange). Visiting the epiphany-inducing tombs of Mevlana Rumi and his spiritual companion Shems in Konya, their baraka bathing the journey, the grave of Turkey's great native Sufi poet, Yunus Emre, and traveling through a land of such subtle spirituality, these poems chronicle an imagistic diary through both interior and exterior countrysides, with the second half continued in the same vein at home in Philadelphia.

COATTAILS OF THE SAINT - is a collection of poems which chase after the coattails of sanctity, in this world with its "meanings set up as images" (a Sufi definition of what we take around us as reality), and those souls living among us right now and forever who have had bestowed upon them that dimension of sanctity which sets them apart while making them at the same time true human beings. Imagination has given these poems a "saintly" thread, with no particular saint in any traditional pantheon meant, but rather that essence of simple sainthood of which we are all (God willing) capable.