The Reader In Me, Awaiting Awakening Poem by Mystic Qalandar

For years I believed
reading and writing
were two separate roads—
close enough to glimpse each other,
never to meet.

I confess:
I have been a poor reader.
I never had the patience
to sit with a book
from first page to last.
I would hold it,
read the opening pages,
then open somewhere in the middle,
almost at random,
read a little there,
and turn to the end.
I gathered fragments.
I never followed
the whole journey.

Sometimes I came to Scripture
the same way—
opening it blindly,
reading whatever verses
fell before my eyes.
Not as method,
not as boast,
but as an honest account
of how my mind has always moved.

Perhaps I have always been drawn
more to the unexpected spark
than to the sustained argument,
more to the sentence
that suddenly opens a window
than to the long road
that leads to it.

Writing was different.
Writing came
as an inward necessity.
I could sit with a thought,
an image,
a question,
a moment of revelation,
and let it become words.
Writing never felt like obligation.
It felt like listening.

Now, late in life,
something stirs—
a need to awaken
the reader in me.
With it comes
a strange fear:
Will becoming a reader
require me to sacrifice
the writer in me?
Will hours spent reading
steal the hours,
the silence,
the inward space
from which my poems arise?
Will disciplined reading
silence the spontaneous voice
that has walked beside me
so long?

I am beginning to think
I have misunderstood
the relationship between the two.
Reading need not be
the enemy of writing.
Perhaps reading is the soil
in which writing deepens.

There is another truth
I must acknowledge.
I have not read much
of the great poetry of the world—
only a few poems
I happened to meet
along the way.
Nor have I systematically read
the great philosophers.
Much of what I know of them
has come through fragments—
excerpts,
passages,
quotations,
chance encounters.

Much of what I have written
has not grown
from long apprenticeship to books,
nor from deep familiarity
with literary and philosophical traditions.
Whatever value or limitation
my writing may carry,
it has grown largely
from observation,
reflection,
experience,
inward questioning,
and those sudden moments
when a thought seems
to arrive on its own.

Perhaps this is why
I now feel the need to read.
Not to discover
what I should have thought.
Not to imitate
voices that came before.
But to enter conversation
with minds
that have travelled roads
I have scarcely visited.

I may never become
the kind of reader
who reads hundreds of books
cover to cover.
Nor do I think I need to.
Perhaps I need to learn
a different kind of reading—
slower,
deeper,
more contemplative.
To read a page
and pause.
To meet a sentence
and live with it awhile.
To let a thought
from another mind
meet something dormant
in my own.

Perhaps I can begin
with the way I have always read:
a few pages at the beginning,
a passage chosen almost by accident
from the middle,
and the ending.
But instead of stopping there,
I can let curiosity
lead me back—
back to discover
the journey
I once overlooked.

I do not want to become
merely someone
who has read many books.
I want to become someone
who has been changed
by what he has read.

Still, I want to receive,
to make my own,
the poetry and philosophy
of the great writers—
the luminaries
of our poetic
and philosophic history.
Not to become their echo,
but to enter their conversation.

Perhaps the writer in me
does not have to die
for the reader in me
to awaken.
Perhaps
they have been waiting
for each other
all along.

The reader receives.
The writer responds.
And somewhere
between the two,
something deeper awakens—
a conversation
between the mind
that has spoken
and the soul
that has been listening.

—MyKoul