When My Voice Becomes Wind Poem by Yousif Ibrahim Abubaker Abdalla

My radiant heirs of breath and bone,
The hour of my unfastening is unwritten somewhere beyond the rim of dawn
a clock without hands rehearses my silence.
I know not when the dust will claim
the architecture of my footsteps,
nor when my voice will loosen
into wind.
Yet before that hush
I bequeath you this covenant:
Pursue not the pale arithmetic of grades,
those gilded numerals that glitter and perish.
Seek instead the feral question, the question that rends the veil of habit,
that bruises the locked ribs of certainty.
Study not as merchants of approval,
but as cartographers of the unseen.
Interrogate the horizon.
Disquiet the obvious.
Let your minds be tempest and telescope a storm that unsettles falsehood,
a lens that summons distant truths
into trembling clarity.
Do not apprentice your destiny
to the narrow mercy of employment.
Be not petitioners at another's threshold.
Become architects of providence,
forgers of unimagined vocations.
Let industry rise from your own anvil;
let your labor bear the sacrament
of your signature.
Refuse the borrowed chair.
Raise your own citadel of endeavor.
Invent the door.
Invent the key.
Invent the room in which the future kneels.
And when my breath dissolves
into the invisible grammar of eternity,
let this refrain endure within you, Learn as though the cosmos were unfinished.
Question as though truth were a hidden fire.
Create as though you were entrusted
with dawn itself.