After I Leave Poem by Mystic Qalandar

Do not speak of me as gone.
I was never a fragment to be lost,
but the unbroken whole beneath all form—
the light without a wick,
that neither flickers nor fades.

If you feel a presence near,
it is not a visiting ghost, but the One Breath
moving through leaf, through stone, through air—
the constant pulse of Wahid al-Wujūd,
without origin, without end.

I am the chinar, rooted not in soil,
but in the infinite ground of being.
My branches are not marks of separation,
but gestures of radiant, spreading fullness.

I stand beside the graveyard of fleeting things—
a timeless witness, offering shade
to every wandering soul.
Listen: the leaves rustle an eternal hymn—
a song without pause, where every sorrow
turns to petals, rising whole and free
on the breath of the Ever-Present.

When I lean into the wind's distant song,
it is not a memory of arrival or departure—
but the seamless Now, the eternal chord
where you and I dissolve into pure presence.

I have not passed away.
I am the unchanging truth within your chest,
the radiance that was, is, and will be—
the essence that neither leaves nor arrives,
for it has always been here.

—October 6,2025