Walking After Yeats

Poem by Z I Mahmud

I learned tenderness

from a man who spoke to swans

as if they remembered him.

Yeats—yes, him—

who knew that splendor is loud

and love must whisper.

He taught me this:

that heaven is not owned,

only imagined.

That gold belongs to crowns and altars,

but longing belongs to hands

that come back empty.

If I had what he dreamed of—

the sky’s slow needlework,

dawn stitched into dusk,

moonlight hemmed with shadow—

I would lay it out like a quiet vow,

a road soft enough for bare feet.

But I have watched the world closely,

as he did,

and learned how easily radiance bruises.

I have seen empires crumble in daylight

and hearts survive on nothing

but remembered music.

So I offer what he offered me:

not riches, not proofs,

not the noise of certainty—

only the fragile architecture of hope,

the thin fabric of wanting,

the hush between one breath and another.

These are not treasures that glitter.

They are the things that tremble.

They are made of nights spent awake,

of words rewritten until they tell the truth,

of faith that knows it may not be answered

and still kneels.

Yeats stands beside me, smiling gently,

as if to say: this is enough.

That love is not the cloth,

but the careful laying-down of it.

That the dream, once offered,

must be trusted to another’s step.

So if you come near—

come lightly.

Not because the gift is precious,

but because it is alive.