I Am No Puppet Poem by Mystic Qalandar

I am no puppet.
No threads pull me.
I have slipped the loom
of woven fate.

I am free—
not because no cage surrounds me,
but because I have dissolved
the bars of becoming.

Beyond the cage,
I take wing—
beyond time and space,
beyond the veils of self
that shimmer, then fall
like breath upon a mirror.

Freedom lives in my 'fitrah'—
the primordial flame
that needs no kindling,
the uncreated light
that witnesses all worlds
and remains unseen.

No threads bind me:
not wind,
not sea,
not even the stars
I watch in the solitude of night.
For I am the gaze itself—
the seer and the seen,
the silence between breaths,
the One
reflected in the many.

Freedom is to live
the truth of 'fitrah' without complaint—
neither captive
to a smile
nor to a tear;

to rest in an intense stillness,
a quiet within
where the ocean of the Infinite
meets the shore of the finite,
and neither is diminished.

Here, the heart is not at peace—
it is peace.
Here, the soul does not seek—
it is the sought.

I am the dot beneath the 'bā',
the secret within the secret,
the name that cannot be spoken
because it is the speaker.

Here I am—
where I have always been,
where I shall always be.

—MyKoul