FROM NAZLIKUL, AS THE YEAR ENDS: A MYTHOLOGICAL LETTER WRITTEN INWARD

This is a letter,
A sealed breath laid upon the chest of Time,
A word written inward, yet longing to change what lies outside,
Its pen tip touching the past,
Its ink touching a future consciousness.

Another year falls from the calendar,
Seconds scatter in the wind
Like the ashes of civilizations.

And I write…
Not to everyone,
First to myself,
Then to humanity.

On the stone steps of Olympus, the shadow of Homer whispers:
“Remember! A letter is the longest objection a human being writes against their own fate.”
Hermes, messenger of the gods,
Ran through the ages on his winged sandals
Just to fit a single truth
Into a human heart.

Lightning strikes in the skies of Zeus,
But the true thunder is within man:
Conscience falls silent,
Fear speaks up,
And that is why the letter is written.

On the banks of the Nile, Isis stitches wounded souls together,
In the dismembered body of Osiris lies the mirror of humanity.
Egypt’s sands keep thousands of letters,
Prayers that were never sent,
Cries that were never read…

Against the silent pyramids of the pharaohs,
A child’s breath bending over paper
Is more revolutionary,
More eternal,
More real…

While the dragon holds up the sky over China,
Lao Tzu whispers softly:
“The word becomes the way; the way changes destiny.”
Letters written on bamboo paper
Pass through war, famine, and dynasties.
Because humanity
Fell hardest when it kept silent,
And rose again each time it wrote.

On the Russian steppes
Pushkin’s pen, Dostoevsky’s heart, Tolstoy’s conscience
Drift like a winter breath.
Letters written from the exile wagons
Are the world’s heaviest testimonies.
The line a mother writes to her son for the last time
Sometimes disgraces an empire,
Sometimes restores a people’s honor.

And there man learns:
A letter, sometimes beside a poor stove,
Sometimes on a frosted train window,
Is the greatest revolution of all.

In the Persian palaces Zoroaster speaks:
“Guard the fire! But first read the fire within you!”
A letter, like fire,
If it does not burn, it does not warm,
If it does not burn, it does not awaken,
If it does not burn, man does not become man.

The Persian wind carries poetry,
Poetry turns into a letter,
The letter challenges life.

In the German forests, amid the mists of Teutoburg,
A voice echoes:
“Man is free only when he writes to his own conscience!”
The questions Nietzsche nailed down,
The polished words of Goethe,
Heine’s tears of exile
Are lines set down in the soul-register of a nation.

And there it becomes clear:
A nation is strong not by the size of its post office,
But by the letters that reach its conscience.

The shaman strikes his drum,
The northern wind touches the chest of man.
There, a letter is written into the sky,
Into the bark of trees,
Into the memory of mountain and stone…
The spirit speaks,
The word becomes a wing.

On the Turkish steppes a horse neighs
As smoke rises inside the nomad’s tent
A father leaves his son with a single sentence:

“Do not forget, my son…
What makes a man human
Is not what he possesses,
But the truth he is able to speak.”

On the marble roads of Rome
The letters of destiny, written in Latin script,
Even when they outlast states, laws, and imperial pride,
In the end still come to rest in a heart.
Because every civilization
First wrote it upon its heart,
Then carved it into its walls,
Then left it to history.

And now I come to our own time…
There are telephones,
There are satellite signals,
There are images that reach the other end of the world in a single second…
Yet in no age has man
Been this lonely,
This silent,
This disconnected from himself.

We communicate
But we do not talk.
We write
But we do not feel.
We see
But we do not understand.

This is why,
As the year ends,
This letter is not written “outward,”
But “inward.”

To our own selves,
To the conscience we have forgotten,
To the heart we have silenced,
To the human side of us we have abandoned…

O humanity,
O great child who has made the same mistake for centuries,
Know this:

A letter is not merely paper.
A word is not merely sound.
A message is not merely communication.

A letter
Is a vow a person makes to themselves.
A word
Is a pact made with destiny.
A correspondence
Is the conscience-record of a society.

This is why I write:

Let it be a world where conscience speaks, not power.
Let it be a future guided by the word, not by fear.
Let it be an age weighed by pens, not by weapons.

And let man
Not forget that he is the postman of history.

Because each one of us
Will either write a letter to the darkness by staying silent,
Or send a future to the light by speaking.

As the year ends,
These lines
Are not merely a poem,
But a call to humanity:

Look inward,
Write inward,
Change from within.

Happy New Year