Weren't you, bronzed with sun, pressing white lips to mine in November, who promised me, as a gift, oases of flesh and soul? I know the world is broken! Desires of tireless flesh, on fields of harvest and battle— whom will you summon tomorrow? With you, passions will not diminish when I have built them into a tower, I will cast them into the desert from the hollow of breasts to the heart. Where nothing signifies the trembling flesh of captivity, do not swear to keep me burning: self-immolation has gone out of fashion. Where the drowning man lies parched in the white desert's oases, promise me the freedom of spirit for this triumphant body.
# In the Oases of Body and Soul In the oases of body and soul, where the mirage dissolves into water, I have learned to drink from the silence that blooms between two heartbeats. The desert taught me this: that thirst is a language, that sand remembers every footprint, that the horizon is not a line but a conversation between earth and sky. I have walked where the body is a well and the soul a star reflected in its depths— each one feeding the other, each one lost without the other's light. In these oases, time moves like dunes, reshaping itself with every wind. What was solid becomes drift. What was scattered finds form. And I have learned to be both: the water that quenches, the thirst that calls. The body speaks in the language of touch, the soul in the grammar of longing. Between them, a garden grows— green and improbable, real only because we believe in it, real because we tend it with our breath. In the oases of body and soul, there is no separation. The palm tree does not ask which root drinks deepest. The date does not choose between sun and soil. So I have stopped choosing. I have become the oasis itself— a place where opposites meet and embrace, where the weary traveler finds not answers, but the courage to walk further into the unknown, carrying water and stars in equal measure.
Share this article