The Traveller On The Mystic Path Poem by Mystic Qalandar

We were never veiled, nor were we ever apart—
where did we search, what did we seek?
We stripped every direction bare
and found the Beloved folded in every eye,
lost not in distance but in our own blindness.
Not on dusty roads, not in crumbling ruins,
not in the wild throes of madness or the still seas of calm,
not beneath mosque domes or ringing temple bells,
not in a verse of scripture, not in an idol's hollow spell.

We questioned atom, wind, and trembling spark,
wept onto the eyelashes of stars—
and each thing breathed the one reply:
'When were you and I ever apart? '

We chased the pattern, made each letter a qibla,
while the Truth stood silent under our own feet.
We were prisoners of our own thinking,
architects of our own exile.

Then the search grew weary and slept,
and silence closed over every question.
A door opened in the chest. A voice:
'I was, I am, I remain—
you were only veiled by your own eye.'

The road to Truth is not walked, but unveiled.
When the wall of I came down,
one face looked back from every side.
The drop did not fall into the ocean—
it became it.

No search. No seeker. No distance.
Only the old call, sounding now as silence: Hū.

If anyone still asks,
'Where did they go, where did they hide? '—
I will answer,
and the stone around my heart will break:
They never went.
They were never hidden.
We wandered, tired, outside our own house,
while they moved in our pulse,
in the rhythm of breath,
behind the veil of the eye,
nearer than our own silence.

—MyKoul