Mirror-Mason

In the oldest quarter of the city—where the buildings leaned like tired elders trading memories—lived an aging mason named Yaros. His hands were chipped from decades of stonework, but his touch remained impossibly gentle, as if he were forever smoothing the cheek of a sleeping child.

He was known for repairing walls no one else cared about: the alleyway arches, the forgotten corners, the places where the city sighed quietly. But one autumn, he began a project with no request and no blueprint. At dawn, he brought with him a small sack of slivers—tiny mirrors he had sanded by hand until their edges felt like breath.

Each morning, he set a new mirror into the wall. Each night, the city walked past unaware.

What no one knew was that these were not ordinary mirrors. Yaros had spent years collecting reflections—not of faces, but of moments. He believed that every person carried a poem inside them, even if they never uttered a line. And sometimes, he thought, the world just needed a surface that could coax that poem back into light.

When the sun slanted at the right angle, the mirrors awakened. Instead of showing the viewer’s face, they shimmered with a single verse—just one—drawn from somewhere between the heart and the day’s quiet ache.

A tailor passing by saw:
“Mend gently what has been torn.”

A schoolchild saw:
“Run toward the world; it is kinder than you think.”

A grieving mother saw:
“Some absences glow brighter than any presence.”

People began to linger near the wall. They shifted their bodies, turning slightly, testing the light. Each angle revealed a different glimmer of text, as if the city itself were whispering its hidden wisdom through Yaros’s handiwork.

No poem repeated.

No poem explained itself.

And no poem stayed for more than a single heartbeat.

When winter arrived, Yaros finished the last stone, pressing the final mirror into place. His fingers trembled from cold or age—it didn’t matter which. He stepped back, gazing at the wall the way some people look at their life’s only love.

“May the city read itself well,” he murmured.

He passed away quietly that spring. But the wall did not forget him. On certain mornings, when the first light grazes its surface, a new line appears—one no one can quite attribute to any passerby:

“A life is measured not in years, but in what it chooses to reflect.”

The city never removed the wall.
How could it?
It had become its own kind of living poem.