The Burden of Being
By Abdul Haque Chang
No path of love unveiled, no dusk of madness came,
No morning’s covenant whispered, no gateway led to grace—
We wandered the roads of exile like omens carved in stone,
Standing in the town square, turned to ruins of reflection.
We were—yet not quite.
What was, was all else,
And fate—fierce and urgent—unmasked every possibility,
Striving to declare even what dared not be.
Worse than a washerman’s tattered rag,
We were like broken tombstones
In a forgotten graveyard—
Half-speaking tales of life and death,
Becoming death itself in silent echo.
No dirge-singer sang, no sorrowful lute played;
The stench of being rose from soul to skin,
Dragging existence from realm of possibility
To the silence beyond form.
No philosopher’s prose, no myths of nation,
No scholarly sleight of hand
Could quench this thirst of the self.
We, like lepers unknown,
Wandered the jungle of solitude,
Angered even at our own shadow.
Healers became butchers—
Their arrows of cure mere cleavers of commerce.
On every wall in every city,
“Entry Forbidden” was inscribed—
And none dared ask, "To whom?"
The scholars of life
Took to ravishing wisdom by force—
And we—drunken with death—
Were ordered to sip the chalice of poison
As if it were divine command.
Yet we thirsted for that enduring venom,
For death was but a form of life.
Who kills by dying?
The drummers of knowledge
Struck false gongs in triumph,
And Yazid was crowned
While calling himself Husayn.
No battlefield of Karbala like that
Had ever been raised—nor is now.
Suffering was given the name of eternity,
And consciousness—the rogue leader
Of a pack of stray dogs—
Was noted thus in the lexicon of knowledge.
To speak was a crime;
To be silent—a sin.
There was no path to what was lost,
No miracle lighting what could come.
Quietly we journeyed
Toward a barren and forsaken village
Where silence was the only sound,
Where the name of civilization
Was a mask for its ruin.
A place where humanity could begin anew—
Where you were new,
Where I was new,
Where we became what we were meant to be.
Where thought alone ruled,
And thoughtless thought no longer reigned.
Where existence was unburdened of its weight—
Where the self became
A sacred thread in the cloth of cosmos.
Where the walls
Between being and non-being
Leaned into the night of Kun fa Yakoon.
Where being and intoxication
Circled the twilight of eternity—
In reverence,
In stillness,
In the hush of divine mystery.
