Poem

Deep in the layers of sleep, your childhood dream clung and latched on, refusing to part from the stories of the past that you would one day hesitate to remember. So that childhood dream hung tightly from Hoja’s arm, forcing the man from Akshehir not to return to the waking world.

But Hoja—whom in the real world you know as a storyteller—as always, spoke with simple innocence: “Well then, if I remain in your dream forever, how will people ever come to know me as Nasruddin?”

You froze, silent, unable to argue with Hoja. So, in a fit of childish irritation, you—the child you once were—decided to choose only a hundred from more than a thousand tales. Not an easy task. Months passed, then years, until “the hundred” was chosen; and you became a teenager.

Sulung (Firstborn) Poem | By Gus tf (Original Bahasa Indonesia) Apa yang sering menjadi ciri mimpi kanak-kanakmu, saat kau memikirkan

People call him Alexander, but you prefer the name he carried when he first stepped into your childhood dream: Al-Iskandar. And truly, what isn’t extraordinary about Al-Iskandar?

When his parents married, his mother dreamed that her womb was struck by lightning—a blaze bursting forth, flooding the universe with light. A few nights later, his father dreamed as if to answer her vision: he saw himself sealing his wife’s womb with a sigil carved with the face of a lion.

You have never seen a miracle—you only hear of it, or read stories about one. But Darwin, in his childhood dream, saw his grown self observing two birds from two different islands. Darwin as a child knew the birds were not the same, just as Darwin the adult knew the birds were not different.

“Those who don’t believe,” murmured the adult Darwin, “will surely say: Two Creators must have been at work.” And the young Darwin, seized by an overwhelming irritation, tried to break free from the dream. But he couldn’t. Of course he couldn’t—because you did not allow it. For Darwin’s childhood dream lived inside your own childhood dream, and you did not want him to awaken before someday reaching the Galápagos.

Fourteen years after Einstein died, subatomic particles were still divisible into quarks and gluons. And in your childhood dream, you saw the young Einstein sitting astride a quark, drawing his bow across a violin with a pocket compass tied dangling from the violin’s neck.

Its string—that thread of gravity—trembled, sending a soft hum down the corridor of your ear. The quark kept circling the gluon. In the outer layer, electrons kept circling the quark and gluon. Everything spun, widening, expanding. Gravity stretched, widening further.

In that childhood dream you drifted into sleep. Then awoke into this arrangement: You and Einstein sat astride “something” spinning around the earth. It spun on and on. In the outer layer, that “something” and the earth spun around the sun. Still spinning.