We are not a sealed jar,
nor a locked book
like the Jews who kept
their bloodline in a narrow river.
We are a mountain’s veins —
fed by the snows of Zagros,
by the streams of Iran,
by the rains from Anatolia’s sky.
Yet in our heart,
the stone remains the same —
Hurrian fire,
Mannaean breath,
the same tongue the wind spoke
long before empires came.
No East’s yellow dawn,
no foreign tide
can erase our shape.
We are carved
in the rock between seas,
standing where we began.