Listening To My Echo Poem by Mystic Qalandar

Listening to my echo
is like casting a voice
into the vaulted dome
of a Jumma Mosque—

not to hear myself return,
but to discover
there was never a self
apart from the returning.

My voice rises—
authentic, unadorned,
a resonant cosmic utterance,
a long breath of Hu
unfolding through hidden chambers
until the breath no longer belongs to me
but breathes me.

A memory older than memory:
the First Covenant.
'Am I not your Lord? '
And the one who answered Yes
was not separate from the asking—
the question and its answer
a single light
momentarily folded
into the illusion of two.

The echo does not merely return;
it reveals what was never scattered:
every fragment I called self
was the Whole
practicing the art of forgetting,
so it might know itself
through the joy of remembering.

The call that wakens within the call
is the same call.
The hall does not dissolve into the voice—
the hall was always the voice,
wearing the costume of stone and silence,
of arch and absence.

Even the sea beneath the full moon
is not transformed by light—
it is recognized
as light that learned to move.

I speak,
and discover I am being spoken.
The echo scatters
only to prove
it cannot be lost.
Every face I almost recognize
from before the veil of becoming
is my face,
is the Face,
the One wearing the many
as a dreamer wears
a thousand nights.

There are no chambers.
There is no architecture of remembrance.
There is only the One
pretending to open doors
within Himself,
delighting in each threshold
as though it were a distance—

when all along
the seeker, the sought,
the mosque, the dome,
the echo and its origin,
were folds of a single silence
too vast to hear itself whole
except through this—

this voice,
this moment,
this tender fiction of me
through which the Real
leans close
and whispers
Hu—

and recognizes
Itself.

— MyKoul