The Poet's Path

In the heart of a dusty, forgotten village surrounded by silent hills and golden fields lived a boy named Arman. From a young age, he was unlike the others. While boys his age chased goats or played in the mud, Arman sat beneath the ancient banyan tree, scribbling words on torn pages and murmuring verses to the wind.

His father, a stern farmer, believed poetry was a waste of breath. “Words don’t feed a family,” he’d say. His mother, gentle and worn, would smile secretly at Arman's poems, hiding them in her prayer book so his father wouldn’t burn them.

Arman’s world was small but alive with feeling. His pen was his only escape—from poverty, from pain, from dreams that seemed too big for the life he had.

By the time he turned sixteen, Arman had filled dozens of notebooks with his thoughts. Love, loss, nature, the stars—everything became poetry in his hands. But the village had no use for poets. His father wanted him in the fields. His teachers mocked his dreams. Even his friends drifted away, not understanding his silence or the sorrow in his eyes.

Then came the fire.

One winter evening, a storm rolled across the fields. Lightning struck the shed where Arman kept his treasured notebooks. By the time he reached it, flames had devoured everything. Years of writing—gone. Words he had never spoken aloud, feelings he had never shared—turned to ash.

He fell to his knees, tears mixing with rain, whispering the lines he could still remember. In that moment, something inside him broke. The poet in him went silent.

For two years, Arman didn’t write a single word.

He worked in the fields. His hands grew calloused, his eyes dull. His mother’s health faded, and she passed away with one of his poems still folded beneath her pillow. At her funeral, he found that poem—soggy, smudged, but still readable. She had kept it close to her heart. As he read it aloud by her grave, villagers gathered, listening in silence. Some wept.

That day, something stirred in him again.

He began to write once more—secretly at first. On scraps of cloth, on the backs of sacks, even on leaves. He poured into words all that he had lost: his mother, his dreams, his broken spirit. Slowly, his verses found life again, deeper and more powerful than before.

One evening, he walked to a nearby town and attended an open poetry reading. Nervous and shaking, he stood before a small crowd and recited a poem called “The Hands That Held the Soil.” It was about his mother, about sacrifice, about unseen love. When he finished, the room was silent. Then, applause erupted—long, warm, and genuine.

That night changed everything.

Word spread. A local teacher offered to publish his poems in a small magazine. A few months later, a poet from the city invited Arman to attend a literary festival. There, he spoke on a stage for the first time, not as a farmer’s son or a village boy, but as a poet.

He didn’t become famous overnight. But slowly, his poems found their way into books, newspapers, and people’s hearts. He wrote about the pain of broken dreams, but more importantly, he wrote about the beauty that rises from them. About how ashes can still bloom if the fire within survives.

Years later, Arman returned to his village—not with riches, but with respect. Children gathered around him to hear his stories. Even his father, now old and quiet, asked him to read one of his poems aloud beneath the banyan tree.

Arman’s path was not easy. It was carved through loss, ridicule, and silence. But each step he took, guided by the rhythm of his heart, brought him closer to himself.

The poet’s path was never straight.
It twisted through sorrow, and sang through pain.
But in the end, it led to light—
Where broken dreams became beautiful verses.