Poetry in flames

Teach Me to Leave Footprints A.R.ABDULLAH Teach me to spend my life the way the sea spends itself against impossible stone, not because it believes the mountain will surrender, but because singing has always been holier than winning. I do not wish to leave this world with clean hands. Give me the palms that smell of cedar, of coffee, of rain on forgotten stations, of books carried through cities that never learned my name. Let my heart become a compass that trembles whenever beauty is near. Not a map. Maps have borders. The soul has birds. I have watched the moon kneel inside a puddle, and for one impossible second the whole sky fit beneath my shoe. Tell me, what emperor has ever owned a kingdom that miraculous? We chase crowns while miracles grow wild between the cracks of ordinary sidewalks. Perhaps heaven has always preferred barefoot people. I want a life that smells of train smoke and orange peels, of midnight conversations that begin with laughter and somehow end with strangers confessing the names of their oldest ghosts. I want to love without measuring. To lose without hardening. To wander without asking whether wandering will pay. Because somewhere between hunger and wonder, God hid the doorway. Don't hand me a polished destiny. Give me a road that keeps changing its mind. Give me cafés where poets argue with silence, where old women stir eternity into chipped porcelain cups, where every cracked window holds together a sunrise too beautiful to explain. Give me a life that cannot fit inside a résumé. They told us to build a fortress. But every cathedral began with an open sky. They taught us to count our victories. Meanwhile the violin was busy breaking hearts with only four strings. Who taught the birds economics? Who convinced the rivers to invoice the sea? creation has never spoken the language of profit. Only abundance. Only surrender. Only song. There is a loneliness that tastes like winter. And there is another that tastes like standing before the ocean, realizing your heartbeat has been trying to become a wave all along. So let me fail magnificently. Let my mistakes bloom like poppies through abandoned walls. Let every broken dream become another lantern hung inside my ribs. I'd rather be a lighthouse missing half its stones, than a palace that has never known the sea. When I die, don't say he was careful. Say: he interrupted sunsets to watch them longer. He crossed streets because music escaped an open window. He believed that strangers were unopened letters. That language wasn't invented to impress, but to rescue. That every poem is simply a wound discovering it can sing. And if tomorrow finds me with nothing, no fortune, no certainty, no monument wearing my name, let it find my pockets full of seashells, my shoes full of foreign dust, my voice still trembling like a match refusing the wind. Because I was never dreaming of living forever. Only of living so fiercely that even silence would remember the sound of my footsteps.