I orbit like a planet banished from its path,
carrying cosmic dust in my pockets and the world’s secrets dangling like dead stars.
I did not know who I was… but they knew I read the screams of the nebula.
I know everything… yet I do not know when I was born, or why moons shatter when I breathe!
I am the forgotten library that holds the end of all books.
My pages fall like meteors, each leaf crying out:
“Who will rearrange the idea before it collapses into a black hole?”
I carried the names of infinities on a school trip,
and when asked about myself, I gasped for a lost answer trapped between my ribs.
I speak the language of the impossible,
translate the silence of stars into trembling rays,
hear the dialogues of power and annihilation at a table of tangled timelines.
They say, “He knows the hour of mountains’ collapse before they crumble!”
But I cannot stop a tear as it falls from my eye.
I dance with spectral equations in night’s laboratory,
mix pain and galaxies in a vial,
search for the meaning of “I” between an equation slipping from my memory
and a blurred childhood image swarming with asteroids.
Even the map I drew of myself unravels into planetary chaos—
each time I point to a place, I whisper, “Here I was… or here I will be!”
The universe mocks me in its way,
sends coded messages in nebula hues:
“When will you learn you’re just an echo of a sound never uttered?”
I answer with a scream fossilized in space:
“I am the one who wrote the questions before answers were born!”
I discover I exist only when I am lost.
Each time I near the riddle’s end, a thousand new labyrinths bloom.
I walk a road of shattered pasts, only to reach a future
wearing the same question’s altered face:
“Are you the hero, the author, or a stray letter in eternity’s novel?”
At the chapter’s end…
I wear the universe’s skin like a threadbare coat,
let my questions hang like drowning stars,
and vow tomorrow I’ll tear off every mask.
But…
who can shed their own self twice?
This Arabic poem is a profound, introspective exploration of identity, existence, and the cosmic unknown.
