En Route to Makkah

2 Minutes Read Time

This black and white photograph shows a radio, presumably on mute.

My sisters and I swathe down to ankles
in plain shalwars and row up like duckpins 
in the backseat. Every pilgrimage resembles 
the other. The car belts down the freeway, 
breaches past the occasional tamarisks
that flash along the corridor unreeling 
barren mountains. Mother winds the radio 
down to mute—against the ungodliness
of stringed instruments my ears strain
for a stray twang and beat. In this country, 
I can’t tell what unbraids the consecrated 
from the wet glitter of appetite.
Across eastern oil fields, geologists 
tap the seep of ancient dead, and 
towering drills pound fossil to froth
for the tireless alchemy of black barrels 
and guzzling ocean pipes. Minarets echo
haya al’ falah, come to success, and skyscrapers 
sprout across the holy city, along the hills 
stippled with old rock houses.
Above the Ka‘aba, the gilded entablature 
rouses the masjid’s marbled grounds 
pilgrims wheel. They close their eyes
and pledge: Labbayk Allah-humma labbayk,
Here I am, o Lord, here I am. How easy, 
I think, to thieve into the dizzy mouth 
of prayer, to ensconce in its swaddling
tunnel vision. But what do I know of faith 
other than the way my own tongue hymns 
each of its deflections: the ramshackle food




stalls that brim the masjid’s
farthest edge, the squelch of a kebab 
sweltering in a humid conch of bread.

Hera Naguib

Hera Naguib was born in Saudi Arabia and has lived transnationally in Canada, Pakistan, and the U.S. She is the author of the poetry collection Rupture Anthem, forthcoming from the University of Pittsburgh Press in Fall 2026.

Winner of the John Mackay Shaw Academy of American Poets Award and the 2022 Quarterly West Poetry Prize selected by S2ally Wen Mao, Naguib’s work has been published or is forthcoming in The Beliver, The Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, AGNI, Poetry Northwest, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, New England Review, Gulf Coast, The Cincinnati Review, Wasafiri, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. Naguib is a former Fulbright Scholar and a recipient of the VIDA Residency Fellowship. Her work has received support from Art Omi, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, Vermont Studio Center, GASHER Press, and the Writers Room of Boston.

Naguib holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Florida State University and a MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She has led writing workshops in a variety of settings, including Florida State University, Forman Christian College University, Kinnaird College for Women, and Beaconhouse National University, and at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. She is currently based in Boston where she teaches at Emerson College.

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