The Qasidat al-Burda, the Poem of the Mantle, is the most widely recited devotional poem in the Sunni world, and its origin story is inseparable from its use.
Muhammad al-Busiri, an Egyptian poet of the thirteenth century, is said to have suffered a stroke that paralysed him. He composed a poem in praise of the Prophet, and dreamed that the Prophet passed a hand over him and placed a mantle over his shoulders; he woke healed. The title refers to that mantle, and it deliberately echoes an earlier poem of the same name by Kab ibn Zuhayr, a contemporary of the Prophet who was said to have received the Prophet's own cloak.
The poem runs to some hundred and sixty verses in ten sections, opening not with praise but with the poet reproaching himself, for love, for tears, for the passions of a soul he cannot govern, before turning to the Prophet's virtues, his birth, his miracles, the Quran, the night journey, his campaigns, and closing in intercession.
Its liturgical use is enormous. It is chanted at mawlid gatherings, at weddings and funerals, in Sufi assemblies from Morocco to Indonesia, in madrasas as a memorisation text, and it is worn as an amulet. Individual verses are used as prayers. It has been translated into Persian, Turkish, Urdu, Malay, Swahili, Punjabi, Hausa and many other languages, and commented on in Arabic hundreds of times.
Very few poems in any language have that reach.