Tell Me Where I Belong Poem by Mystic Qalandar

Before breath,
I was hidden—
a secret folded in silence,
a seed asleep
beneath layers of night,
longing to break open,
to rise like a tender flame
and brush the hem of sky.

As a child,
I was a marionette,
a string-bound soul,
fragile, unfinished.
The world slipped past me,
yet I yearned to hold it,
to bend it,
to claim it as mine—
but the strings
were not mine to cut.

As a daughter,
my share was shadow:
a room without a window,
a breath already spoken for.
I kept my silence
like a hidden spring
that no hand could drain.

When love approached,
I unveiled my longing—
to bind beauty with beauty,
to plunge into waters
that knew no bottom,
to find in another
the mirror of my depths.

Clothed in a wedding gown,
I felt the exile:
a native torn
from her first dwelling.
Nostalgia was given me
as inheritance,
and remembrance
as a silent crown.

Only the heavens
hold my riddle:
why grant me a home,
yet guide me always
to another threshold?
Why plant me in one soil,
only to lift me
into another?

Tell me—
do I belong
to the womb, the tomb,
the house of my birth,
the house of my bond,
or to the house
without walls,
where the soul, at last,
rests in its own light?

—September 9,2025