Boston Review Books

Islam and the Challenge of Democracy
by Khaled Abou El Fadl
(Princeton University Press)

Pilgrim Sonnet Redux

Come poor pilgrims,
There is no shrine, or a way to zero,
Still pilgrims, still pilgrims,
O by shrill and O by quail.

From Nameless Creek to Howling House
Pilgrims go, dry souls, a wanted-for ghost
For each of us who relinquish vowels
Into morning dust, fields turned to hymns.

They shout us down for the way we have not gone there.
They farm burning poems.
They whisper in their rebel sleep.

Poor pilgrims, one by one, come—
The enormous grass is the shrine.
The door is the night you leave behind.

—Andrew Grace

Andrew Grace is the author of A Belonging Field. He is the winner of Southern Poetry Review's 2003 Guy Owen Prize.

Originally published in the December 2004/January 2005 issue of Boston Review