Without Looking Up
Life is fragile. We know this and still, we are never ready. The most difficult things sometimes do happen — and they happen to good people, to gentle people, to people who deserved every beautiful thing. There are no words for this. Allah, the Most Merciful, the Most Gracious — He chose this moment. Not we who loved her, not the world that held her briefly — He who made her. She was six. May she reach the highest Jannah. May her family be wrapped in a patience only He can give. You were love, and you were loved. In the inconceivable grief of your mother, your father, your family — you are, and will always be, an angel. I wrote this poem for you, to honor you the best I could:
Every splinter in my spirit remembers the shape of your tree — not as it fell, but as it once stood, full of birdsong and impossible green. You were so young, when the wind took a seat in your lungs and carried you away without goodbyes. You were so young, I loved you without looking up.
🙏🏾🙏🏾🙏🏾
My friend, this is one of those pieces where the craft and the grief are inseparable, you could not have written it any other way, and it could not have been written by anyone else.
When the wind took a seat in your lungs and carried you away without goodbyes. I do not have words for that image. The gentleness of it. The way it holds something unbearable without breaking.
She was six. And you honoured her the only way a poet knows how, by finding language for what has no language. By refusing to look away.
I loved you without looking up. That ending. The smallness of it. The way love like that just exists, quietly, as ordinary as breathing, and then suddenly it is the most sacred thing in the world.
May she reach the highest rank of Jannah. May her family be carried through this by His mercy alone. And may you be held too, my friend, in the writing of this and in the grief of it. Love and duas. Allāh is the best. ❤️🫶🏻✨️😢