Traveler Poem by Mystic Qalandar

We are passengers on a boat
upon the ocean of existence—
present here, never fully of it.

A traveler carries in his heart
many monasteries, many caravanserais:
a still lake mirroring
forgotten depths of sky;
a chinār tree whose shade
gathers the day's exhaustion
like an old debt forgiven;
a watcher on a frozen peak
who remembers what stations
a cloud must pass through
before it becomes snow;
a lover mad enough
to dwell in the Beloved's embrace,
past the edge of memory.

Places and people become trustees
of his scattered heart,
as if his soul were a broken mirror
entrusted to the cosmos—
each shard guarding
one face of a single light.

Every meeting, a sanctuary.
Every parting, an initiation.
Every threshold whispers
across the silence between worlds:
Return, when your soul remembers
where it set out from.
We will wait for you
at the edge of your forgetting.

So he departs
for a home already loved,
a home that lives in his own footprints—
each leaving a rehearsal
for the Great Departure,
each return a reminder
that arrival was never the point.

No house can hold the true Home.
Yet every house lets in a little of its light,
as every mirror carries the one sun,
and every finite cup
holds a mouthful of an infinite thirst.

Every migration, a small death—
the loosening of the I
that lived by certainty.
Every remembrance, a quiet resurrection—
the soul turning back
toward what it never put down.

Still he walks.
More shelters wait inside him:
a cell on a mountain
where silence prays itself into stone;
a marketplace thick with sighs
rising like incense toward no sky in particular;
a hut that listens to trees
whose roots speak with the underworld;
a river that will not stop—
the soul's own restlessness, given a shape.

The road teaches what
no destination can:
that everything he ever loved
was, in its hidden way,
also looking for him—
as if the universe itself were an act of remembering,
and we are what that remembering shaped.

The homes he has left keep dreaming in him:
white birds riding the wind's shoulder
like the dead, still speaking through the living;
salt and brine,
the old taste life first rose from;
mountains standing like silent Sufis
who have forgotten even their names;
forests older than memory,
where time stops
to hear a leaf breathe,
and recalls itself
a passing thought
in the mind of the Eternal.

He will return—
not because a place can hold love,
but because love leaves
no threshold untouched,
and the One who lives in every house
is not a stranger to any door.

In the hearth of each beloved room
a flame burns
that no distance puts out—
lit before the first hearth was built,
still burning in the heart
of the placeless, the everlasting.

Coming home, he pauses
like wind that stops a moment
to remember its own path,
carrying stories of roads unseen
that stitch one world to the next,
of secret passages
that link this moment to the last,
and this life to the first covenant.

He tells them to his own, to friends,
and to that Presence
whose embrace is itself a homeland—
where arrival and bewilderment
are the same word.

Every settlement, every stranger,
every mountain, every river,
is a door
through which the Eternal lets itself in—
a veil the Beloved hides behind
in order to be sought,
a covering the One wears
in order to forget,
and so remember again.

In the end he sees
he never went from one home to another.
He was only moving
through the many rooms
of a single, endless House—
this universe no more
than the outer garment
of a Mystery
that fits in no dwelling
and dwells in all of them.

Sometimes a traveler can do nothing
but carry that House in his chest,
until the heart itself turns road,
the traveler turns journey,
the journey turns destination—
until seeker and sought
wear through into each other,
and the search itself stands revealed
as the answer,
wearing the mask of a question.

The One who seemed to be waiting
at the end of every road
was already walking in him
before the first step—
the step, the one who steps,
the ground that takes the step,
the longing before any motion,
the stillness after every arrival.

He was always both:
the migration and the sanctuary,
the journey and the rest,
the seeker,
and the One who—
in the seeking—
is found.

He is still walking.
Not because he failed to arrive,
but because to arrive
is only to keep walking.
The road was the Home all along.

—MyKoul