Recreation Poem by Mystic Qalandar

I

When I took refuge in the forest,
the wounds were my own
and the bullets too were mine—
they passed clean through my back
and taught my breath a new grammar.

I learned that every heartbeat
is a branch swaying
in a wind that has forgotten
where it began.

When the world tried to measure me,
I stood outside its measure.
The trees gathered me into themselves
so completely
I was no longer a man
but a garden scattering its seeds
only to bloom again.

---

II

They wanted to carve me,
to mold me into their own likeness.
There was a method to that disfiguring—
the worn cloth of civilization
drawn tight across my skin,
until I forgot the scent of rain
and the rough speech of bark.

I stripped that cloth away
and carried it to the river.
The current loosened every thread,
and with each bend of water
returned to me
what had lain wordless
beneath the years.

I washed.
My name slipped from me
like dust from open hands.
In the sweetness of formlessness
my edges dissolved
into the moving light.

---

III

This is no ivory tower's escape.
It is the opening of my eyes.

Do not mistake this awakening for peace.
It is a stillness
that keeps the weight of mountains.

Now I walk toward the forest,
where every breath returns
what the world erased.
I press my hands into the earth
without asking.
I lift a fistful of soil to my lips,
as a mother might kiss
the brow of her sleeping child.

---

IV

The trees speak
in the language of leaves—
older than memory,
older than the first story
ever carried by a mouth.

The wind remembers their names
and speaks them aloud
the way a mother calls her child home
at dusk.

The mountains do not stand against me.
They open like ancient doors,
their silence spilling
through the valley.

---

V

In this hidden country,
at the last edge of what cannot be named,
I find the word
no hand can purchase.

I kneel before no temple.
Yet the moss, the river,
the patient cedar, and the circling hawk
leave no corner empty of the sacred.

The world glows
without asking to be believed.

---

VI

Beyond the woven noise of our making,
stone remains stone.
Water remembers its own clear face.
Light falls without choosing
where to belong.

The gaze that first awakened the stars
still moves among the leaves,
and in that endless silence
I recognize the face
I had forgotten.

---

VII

Is this a new creation,
or an old death learning another name?

It no longer matters.

Here, the fern uncurls
as though nothing has ever lived before.
The river arrives for the first time.
The morning has never seen its own light.

And I stand quietly,
witness
to a birth that keeps giving birth—
every instant,
every breath,
every silence.

As Iqbal says:
'This universe, perhaps,
Is still incomplete;
Unceasingly, the echo of 'Be, and it is'
Comes with every passing instant.'

MyKoul

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