You Are Not Cruel, O Life Poem by Mystic Qalandar

Though some may call you ugly,
some may call you unkind—
say you are a stillness
where every breath dissolves
into purposelessness—
I have seen your other face:
the one that arrives as morning,
the one that gathers broken things
and teaches those who stay
how to endure.

You give some people silver mornings,
soft roads, open doors.
Others you bring to their knees
beside their own dreams,
asking them to gather hope
from what remains.

You let some children sleep in warmth.
Others count the stars for bread.
You fill certain homes with music;
in others, grief sits quietly
inside the noise of the walls.

Some hands labor from first light to dark
and return with almost nothing.
Others receive abundantly—
no bone bent,
no palm made rough.

Still, I call you teacher—
whose lessons cut past bone—
and I call you a river
whose current, even so,
knows how to make things bloom.

So if you must test us, Life,
leave us something we can hold.
If you must bend our spirits,
do not turn our warm hearts cold.
Give the weary a sunrise.
Give the broken a song.
Give the dreamer one more reason
to believe they still belong.
Leave within our hands
one small lamp against the dark.
If you must press our backs with sorrow,
do not let bitterness settle
where love once lived.

For though your ways are deep and strange,
and often merciless in feeling—
you are not cruel, O Life.
You are immense—
too wide for the small lantern
of a single moment.
And we, brief-hearted creatures,
keep mistaking the fragment
for the whole sky.

Why do you speak in opposites?
Why does joy arrive
with the shadow of loss beside it?
Why does mercy sometimes wound,
and justice sometimes wait in silence?

Perhaps your paradoxes
are not deception but depth—
a language larger than certainty.
The rain feeds the field
and floods the village.
Fire destroys the forest
and opens the seed.
Love breaks us open
so we may carry more.

Maybe fairness was never
the equal distribution of comfort,
but the equal invitation to become.
And maybe mercy
is not the removal of sorrow,
but the strange strength
placed beside us within it.

So we call you unfair
when we cannot yet read
the long mathematics of becoming.
We call you kind
when your meaning briefly touches shore.

Still—
despite your contradictions,
we wake again to you.
And that itself
feels like an answer.

MyKoul