Thirst At The Threshold Poem by Mystic Qalandar

I.
Truth does not shimmer like a desert mirage,
That spectral womb of fractured longing.
No phantom palms deceive the gaze,
No wells of shadow promise water
Where none has ever been.
Illusion never held a source.
It only taught the eye to ache.

II.
Truth rises as the living sea—
Brackish, boundless, breathing itself.
The horizon dissolves into the eye,
And the one who thirsts is no 'other, '
But a drop rehearsing the dream of distance,
A cup where veiled light turns upon itself.
Here, the far dissolves into the near,
And the near forgets its name.

III.
Here I loosen—
A frail wave in the sea's immense remembering.
Crests flare, troughs vanish;
Each pulse a face of the Absolute,
Each ebb a world returning its name.
Nothing departs the whole.
Everything beats as one heart.
These are no ripples on a distant body,
But mirrors without fracture.
All forms—brief gestures of the Unfathomable—
Dance in the hollow of the sea,
Where the One conceals itself as longing,
Writing and erasing its own reflection.

IV.
What is given to me?
Not a beggar's glimpse through the mist of self.
For here, seeing and seen are one flame.
The drop drinks grace from its own depth,
Tasting the undoing where veils fall away.
And what remains—
A thirst bright as the sun,
No longer lack,
But radiance remembering itself.

V.
The shore was only a habit of division,
An iron word called 'two.'
This face I wore was the sea's own mirror.
Let the winds tear it open.
Let the dream of 'you and I' be stripped bare.
Plunge me—erase me—
Into the abyss where unity begins,
Where every thirst is born as return.

—December,25,2025