The world feels so loud sometimes,
So alive that you forget you’re running out of time.
Not today. Not tomorrow.
But someday, grief shows up one morning and just moves in.
And love?
Love stands by the curtains.
Not handing out comfort to everybody.
Just watching. Waiting.
Seeing what you actually need.
This isn’t a biography I’m trying to list its dates.
This is just a heart that kept going after it got broken.
A soul that figured out the ground is cold,
But still decided to sit in the chair anyway,
Behind the curtains.
This isn’t really about the chairs or the curtains.
It’s about how still you learn to be,
To sit in your grief without letting it crush you.
Like no matter what cracks underneath,
That chair holds.
Except, death…
We call it the uninvited guest,
A weight that settles in the hollow of the chest.
Death is the one crack that swallows everything.
No sounds.
Just a hole that takes the sorrow and the love both at once.
But here’s what I’ve learned:
Death took the person,
The creative mind,
The talented hands.
But it didn’t take what they left behind.
Grief teaches you something If you let it.
Not right away. It beats you up first.
But eventually,
It shows you how to pay attention.
How to hold things tighter without squeezing too hard.
How to sit in the quiet and still find something worth making.
Maybe we don’t get over it.
Maybe we just learn to build around it.
We take the loss and turn it into something.
A poem, a meal, a small kindness,
Or a minute of patience we didn’t have before.
And when the poem forgets it’s a poem
And becomes a room,
It becomes a room where loss finally takes off its coat.
Where love doesn’t just visit anymore,
It sits down to stay.
Where grief and gladness walk in together,
Like they always do, and for once,
They don’t have a single thing left to ask.
Except…
What does the poem say about us?
It says we are the ones who need it.
We’re the ones who take these little black marks,
These little arranged scratches on a page,
And we make them bleed.
We make them bleed with our own blood.
We make them sing with our own throats—
The ones that get tight.
The ones that crack.
We make them hold everything we cannot hold by ourselves.
And then… somehow… we can.
Because we are the creatures who build bridges out of breath.
We are the ones who go looking for our own faces in the ink.
We let the poem teach us death.
Not by lecturing.
Not by explaining.
But by showing us how to live.
And it’s not about filling the hole.
It’s about learning to live around it.
Knowing it’s there.
And still… still creating.
And maybe, that’s enough.
Amina Kasim Muhammad is a Nigerian writer and spoken word poet with a deep passion for storytelling. She finds herself drawn to the way stories can transport readers to different worlds and how ideas can be shaped and shared through the power of writing. Valuing her pen and book as essential tools of expression, she is also an advocate for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Amina is an active member of the Minna Literary Society (MLS) and Open Arts Kaduna, where she engages with fellow creatives and contributes to the literary community. Her work has been published; one of her poems appeared in Synchronized Chaos Magazine. You can connect with her on Instagram: @meena_kasim.