For Mustapha

For Mustapha

Some friendships do not arrive
like doors opening in a house,
but like weather remembering a shore,
like two distant fires
recognizing the same wind.

I do not remember the first minute
the path between us began,
only that poetry was there…
that old lantern in the dark…
and one of us lifted a line
and the other answered.

Perhaps it was you.
Perhaps it was me.
Perhaps the world, with its tired hands,
simply placed us in the same sentence
and waited to see
what kind of light would happen.

You came to me from far away,
from a life I could not have invented,
from roads my feet had never known,
and I from the cold blue country of Canada,
with my own winters, my own silences,
my own small disasters folded in my pockets.

We should have been strangers.
We should have been two opposite stars
that never once shared a sky.

And yet…
through the bright thread of our letters,
through the patient river of our words,
I discovered the miracle:
we had been speaking the same language
all along.

Not only the language of feeling,
not only the language of thought,
but the secret language of cinema, too…
those holy hours of shadow and light,
those exact films,
those same scenes that stayed in the blood
like songs one cannot stop carrying.

So no,
we did not come from completely different worlds.
Your friendship taught me this:

there is one world alone,
and it is vast enough
to hold both your laughter and my grief,
your winters and my winters,
your far horizon and my near one,
until distance itself grows tender
and becomes a kind of home.

Yesterday I turned fifty-six,
and you gave me a birthday
made not of candles,
but of attention.

You wrote me a poem
and I stood astonished before it
as one stands before a mirror
that knows the name of the soul.

How could you have known
so much of me?

How could you have gathered
the fragments I had once spoken and forgotten…
little pieces of old conversations,
small lost feathers of myself…
and returned them to me
whole, shining, alive?

I have lived a life in which
being heard sometimes felt like a miracle
too delicate to survive the room.
I have known the ache
of speaking into open air.

But you listened.

Not the casual listening
that nods and passes by,
but the deep listening
of someone kneeling by a river,
someone who believes
even the smallest stone
is worth learning by heart.

And so your poem reached me
like rain reaching a thirsty field,
like a hand finding another hand
in the dark of a theater,
like proof that I was not invisible
after all.

I wept, yes.
How could I not?
There are gifts that are not objects,
but revelations.

You gave me one.

And I love your writing, Mustapha…
the way it breathes,
the way it leans toward truth
without breaking its own heart,
the way your words seem to know
that tenderness is not weakness,
but a kind of courage
with its sleeves rolled up.

My brother, my friend,
my distant-near miracle of a m8,
I do not know what the first thread was
that bound us together.

Only that it was woven from poetry,
from cinema, from memory,
from all the strange and beautiful evidence
that two lives can meet
and never again be only themselves.

For in your friendship
I have learned this large and shining thing:

that sometimes the soul is recognized
not by blood,
not by religion,
not by birthplace,
not by the map of the world…
but by the way one person
looks straight through the noise
and says, without hesitation,

I see you.
I have been seeing you.
I will keep seeing you.

And that, my dear friend,
will forever be a country big
enough for both of us to live in.