The Awakening Beyond The Lie Poem by Dhiman Shah

Lo, truth did creep upon thee unawares,
Not borne by fate, nor carried by the stars,
But by that quiet law which none escapes—
That truth, though buried, claws through every scar.

Thou didst awaken not at life's first breath,
But at the death of all thou thought'st was thee;
For endings serve as doorways for the brave,
And shattered souls do rise more true, more free.

For every dream thou held'st was but a veil,
Each memory but painted, borrowed glass;
A trembling world of honey'd, gentle lies
To shield thee from a truth too dark to pass.

Yea, we ourselves—the architects of fear—
Did twist our minds with our own trembling hand,
Choosing forgetfulness o'er honest pain,
And thus betrayed the selves we could not stand.

We forged an innocence we could not keep,
A blindness we embraced with trembling breath,
And carved away the knowledge of our birth,
To hide the face of truth we deem'd as death.

But lo—
When all illusions fell to dust,
When lies lay slain and masks were cast aside,
Then didst thou see thy first and truest dawn,
A soul reborn the moment falsehood died.

Thus know:
Thy journey starts where thy old self ends,
For none may rise while clinging to the lie.
He who hath lost the world he thought he knew
Finds realms far deeper than the waking eye.

Yet still thy heart, though waken'd, trembled sore,
For truth is not the balm that I claim;
It is a blade that cleaves the self in twain,
And leaves thee whispering thine own forgotten name.

For when the mind beholds its borrowed past,
And sees the puppeteer behind the veil,
What comfort lies in knowing thou wert shaped
By hands that feared the truth their souls might fail?

Thee wander'd then through corridors of thought,
Where shadows pointed back to what thou'd been—
A ghost of choices never truly made,
A life unliv'd, yet worn upon thy skin.

And bitter grew the knowledge thou hadst gained,
A poison'd wine that none may share or spill;
For once the eyes behold the world unmasked,
The heart must bear the weight of knowing still.

The crowd may sleep in dreams of woven gold,
But thee, awakened, stand alone in night;
Condemn'd to see with eyes that cannot close,
A soul accurs'd by everlasting sight.

For truth, once found, becomes a solemn curse—
A crown of thorns for those who dare to seek;
And though thou stand'st where lies have turned to ash,
Thy triumph tastes of sorrow, sharp and bleak.

Thus falls thy fate, where innocence hath died,
And knowledge burns where once thy hope had lain;
The dawn thou sought'st hath come—but at the cost
Of never being who thou wert again.

For he who sees the truth too late, must walk the world a stranger to himself. Here ends my tale: a heart undone, a life unliv'd, and truth the crueler murderer of all my hopes.