025 | Ciel dessine la terre, 2015

The Sky Draws the Earth

Stars do not move aimlessly — they dance. A slow, faint dance, but one that knows well how to leave its mark on the heart of anyone who gazes long enough. They are not just luminous holes in the fabric of night, but messages from a time not measured by hours, but by wonder, by dreams, by a longing for what cannot be said. When a human lifts their eyes to the sky, it's as if they are returning to a memory deeper than themselves — a cosmic memory, where they were once a star, a thought, or a tiny beam in the maze of light.
They whisper to themselves, without knowing:
"Up there, something resembles me... or resembles what I forgot to become."

At every moment, the sky weaves a secret map of human life. Not a map of rigid fate, but a free melody — whoever catches its tune may dance, may escape the repetition of the ordinary.
Philosophers asked about meaning, lovers read it in the eyes of their beloved, but only dreamers knew that meaning flickers every evening… above our heads, like a star falling in silence.
Perhaps not from sky to earth, but from earth to sky…

Society — with its festivals, planting seasons, folk songs, and ancient rituals — always looked upwards to guide what it did below.
As if the sky were an open book with a single page, changing but never erased.
From Virgo to Sirius, from the crescent to the full moon, civilizations read their timing from lines of light.
And it's no wonder that when a person narrates a night scene, there is always a star, a moon, or even a celestial shadow in the story — for storytelling is nothing but an attempt to recover what the earth forgot from the sky.

The stars… are a celestial tattoo on the body of time.
They are not distant — they are closer than our thoughts, for they dwell in what cannot be spoken.
Perhaps that is why the mystics wrote of the planets as the beloved's eyes, as signs of absence, or as sighs of ecstasy.
And perhaps that is why, when we are lost, we look upwards — not because the stars show us the way, but because we need to believe that even being lost has meaning, and that in every motion in the sky, there is a small secret meant just for us.
And so, each evening, when the sun draws its curtain and withdraws beyond the horizon, we almost believe that the sky begins to write.

Not with ink or words, but with points of light moving in a secret order — a kind of cosmic code.
Stars do not shine in vain — they whisper… they tell of time, of human destinies, of those desires born in the chest without clear reason.
Their motion, slow and precise, is like the pulse of an ancient heart that has known rhythm since the beginning.
And in every shift, in every slight tilt, they draw a hidden map of what is to come:
a birth here, a farewell there, an unexpected meeting at an unforeseen moment.
As if earth is nothing but the shadow of what the stars are writing — a silent mirror for tales told above.

Since ancient times, humanity has raised its eyes to the heavens and asked:
Am I where I am because some star leaned slightly?
Did I love you because two planets met at my birth?
Did the winds change because the moon hid for two nights?

We are not slaves to the sky, nor is it a warden dictating our path — but between us and it lies a shared language:
a language of signs and hints, guiding the dreamer, warning the wanderer, whispering to the poet:
Write — for what you see above is a reflection of what lies within.

I do not see stars as just stars...
I hear the footsteps of ancient time
clapping in our eternal night,
quietly balancing the scales of our souls without our knowing.
I gaze into the night,
not to escape,
but to see my face, scattered
between the Big Dipper
and my mother’s voice saying:
“Plant your dream when the Suhail star rises,
and don’t walk against the crescent moon…”

I am the son of the distant cosmos,
but I was born in a village
that ties its seasons to the motion of a star,
that knows when the rain will come
by the sigh of the moon on an old rooftop.

My friends,
the stars are not mere ornaments for seduction,
nor the poet’s fantasy —
they are the timing of fire and water,
the echo of the first step
when humanity asked the sand:
“Where did I come from?”

In one zodiac sign,
it was written that I would love you when Venus breaks,
and I would leave like a cloud that forgets the names of cities.
And in another sign,
it was written that I would write these words,
just to tell myself:
"Fate is not a sword — it's a poem,
spoken only once in a lifetime."

Thus, the stars walk above our heads, drawing — in silence — a secret map of our lives,
as if saying:
"All that is above echoes in what is below.
And between light and shadow, history is woven."

In early civilizations, the sky was not just a blue or mysterious ceiling — it was an open book,
from which Babylonians, Assyrians, Egyptians, and Arabs read when to plant, when to go to war, and the hour of birth.
The movement of stars was never separate from politics, from decisions, from dreams.
Kings chose their coronation dates based on planetary positions.
And astrologers were the true scribes of kingdoms’ destinies.

But over time, we drifted away from the sky.
That sacred sense of connection faded.
Stars became a visual luxury in city nights — distant decorations, unread, unbelieved, unspoken to.
Yet something within us still turns.
Whenever silence falls and darkness regains its majesty, we lift our eyes —
not in search of an explanation,
but of reassurance.
As if the stars say to us:
"You are not alone — your restlessness mirrors our rotation."

What happens in the sky does not dictate a mechanical fate,
but reflects a broader cosmic image — one we partake in without knowing.
Just as the moon affects the tides, the planets affect the rhythm of emotion,
the timing of absence, the moment of loss,
the hour of joy and grief,
the space of writing and silence.

Perhaps poetry is what most resembles astronomy in its essence:
both express us without explaining us,
both speak truth without using logic.
Thus, poets were never far from the stars —
they are the other stars, orbiting the human soul.

When we lift our eyes to the sky, we do not look only upward —
we look backward.
Every star we see is not present in the moment we see it,
but comes from a deep past —
its light having traveled thousands of years to reach our retina now.
We are not seeing what is, but what was.
The sky, then, is the archive of time — the living memory of the universe.
And this is what confounds understanding:
the truth is not immediate.
Even the present, which we live in and lean on,
is a fragile temporal slip, governed by the radiation of a past we did not choose.
So if stars seem to foretell what will come,
it is not because they possess a hidden will —
but because we, ourselves, live delayed from truth,
in a temporal lag that resembles a dream after death.

Were we born under an astral alignment that makes us love at a specific moment,
lose at a specific time,
and mature when Earth reaches a certain angle in its orbit?
Perhaps…
But only humans, among all beings, ask this question:
Am I free?
And if the answer were “no,”
they would not ask.
The question itself is an act of freedom.
And the stars — despite their grandeur — do not ask.
But we, we look to them as if asking for an explanation for the incomprehensible.
We ask them about love, loss, fear, the meaning of pain,
whether the path we took was a choice —
or an ancient inscription on the vault of heaven.

And the stars — in their great silence — offer no answers,
but neither do they deny.
They simply invite us to listen more closely to what happens within us,
as if it happens in us and around us at once.
As if I am neither here nor there.
I am a point of fracture between two distances,
between two galaxies in the chest:
one burning with longing,
and the other shrinking with absence.

A star once told me,
in a dream that wasn’t mine:
“Don’t search for your path...
but turn with the wind,
and watch how the shadow grows
when the moon disappears.”

I am an orbit without a center,
revolving around myself
as if I don’t know who began me.
I reinvent myself each night,
then sleep,
as if nothing happened.

I am not a poet…
I am a patch of light in no-time,
writing because my body can’t contain what’s within me,
and falling silent —
because the more I speak,
the closer the sky draws.

 

Mohssin Harraki - Summer 2015