The feeling is horrible:  on a searing hot Gulf day, stuck on the highway (or at least what passes for highways in Bahrain), in a very long queue of cars, bumper to bumper, motorists fuming along with their exhausts.  It’s more like a procession than a highway.  You’re claustrophobically cooped up in your mobile sacrophagus, while the airconditioner is progressively failing.  The French say l’inspiration vient en mangeant “inspiration comes while eating”, but in this case, inspiration came while I was stuck in a gigantic traffic jam stretching all the way from Mina Salman to Toobli (Al-Tazej, Yum Yum Tree.)

A moment embalmed in time

In the street, riding on metal,                                                                                          

Cars puffing, black asphalt glistens.

Hand at the wheel, foot on the pedal,

The earth shrieks but no one listens.

I’m at the wheel, running the rat race,

The concrete so hot, the tires melt.

I’m in a tunnel of time and space,

A tunnel so real yet hardly felt.

The fabric of reality gives forth the tunnel,

A web of events, a mundane tissue.

The She above, overlooks the funnel,

As souls pass, fates are issued.

In the hour of the noontide,

I am clear and calm.

All is one flow outside,

A moment is embalmed.

This moment is long, nay eternal,

All thought and feeling, frozen.

The surface is as quiet as the kernel,

This moment in time, is chosen.