By Jamal Garougar
Nourina
Since time immemorial, the heart has been digging a well inside me to listen to its own water… No one knows that peace begins with a single drop negotiating with its stone before leaping toward the light. I walk, and nameless birds hang from my shoulders, gathering what falls from my thoughts as if collecting seeds waiting for the season of departure. I watch the trees hide faces in their bark— one resembles my childhood, another the world’s trembling fear, and a third I do not know, yet it reassures me as it watches from the shimmer of night between the branches. I move forward, and the things around me shift as if the universe were readjusting its geometry to the rhythm of my heart… Stones listen, the air takes notes, grass spells out my footsteps like a child learning the alphabet for the very first time. I love… not a single face, but the space between faces, the luminous space shaped by the quiet passage of the heart. I love how water negotiates with the earth, and how the earth learns from the water’s flow the tenderness of surrender. I also love that everything in the universe is suspended by a delicate thread held by the Creator from an unseen place— and yet this thread breaks only when we close our hearts. I stop, and memory escapes through a window, from which a woman appears whom I do not know, yet I recognize the way she calms the wind as it brushes past her… and I understand that love is not a person, but a ritual that souls learn only when they set themselves aside. I grow silent, and meaning flows from unknown places, as if language had borrowed the voice of clouds and left me fallen in wonder. And when night descends, I feel my heart closing its doors and opening its single window toward a sky that breathes within me… a sky where every star knew my name before I was born, and knew that I came to plant a small garden where the world may rest for just a moment. Thus, I become a sentence in a book vaster than Earth, and my life becomes a code written on a faint light, read by angels searching for a new reason why humans should not grow weary of carrying this planet. And here, within every heartbeat, the heart continues to whisper… Nourina is not the end of the poem— but the beginning of everything.
