The Fire That Asks For Nothing Poem by Mystic Qalandar

There is a fire of love
that needs no wood,
no breath, no priest.

It burns in the cavern of the chest,
in the mute marrow of bones,
in the bright circulation of blood.

Not grief—
though grief is its shadow.
Not hunger—
though hunger echoes its ache.

It asks for nothing of this world:
neither salt nor bread,
neither names nor rites.

It was luminous before words
learned to leave the Àdam,
before the sun learned its rising,
before the jewel remembered orbit—
older than the shadow of the first question.

I have sifted through scriptures,
leaned over the well of forgetting.

I unlearned every map,
every mantra, every ritual,
every mirror that lied—

and the flame climbed still:
a vertical prayer,
a pillar without summit,
a tongue that kisses
the ceiling of possible things.

Only one potter can put out this burning—
not by water, not by will,
but by recognition.

He who drew the first curve behind light,
who taught the void its first song,
who never wrote my name on ink or stone
but breathed it into the breath before dawn—

that same hand,
which kindled the ember in my clay,
will gather it back again,
not as punishment or mercy,
but as return:

flame toward flame,
silence toward silence,

and that one Word
dissolving back into the Unspoken,

where I was already known
and never destroyed.

—MyKoul