While you are grieving your life,
Someone grieved their loved one, gone too soon.
While you are crying over your mere existence,
Someone is fighting death, waiting for a boon.

While you lament the things you did and the mistakes you made,
Someone is wishing to have the opportunities of messing up the way you do.
While you mourn what life could have been,
Someone is longing for more time to be true.

While you crib about the friendships and relationships lost,
Someone is waiting to hold their loved one in a hospital hall;
Against the cold and trembling wall,
They whisper silent prayers, giving their all.

As you sob over another day not lived well, questing your mere existence,
Know that someone, somewhere, wants to trade places with you this instance.

I can't fly, but I

dare to fall, for a moment --


I've got perspective.

Would I bathe in a better blue
if I opened my window to what is true?
Though more at times a bitter blue
than some times a sweeter hue,
isn’t a bitter blue, yet a better blue,
where the sour sun is sweetly due?

What if
I dipped my window
deep down my heart
into some nectar
a la carte,
then opened my art
all wide apart
for a marinated
brand-new start?

Say, I opened it to a field of dancing daisies
hailing the psyche in sun-kissed curtseys
in glee, calling me to swim in a skeptical sea;
to seek to be free in gold-petalled inquiry?

     Hey, lad or lady!

     Swim in our skeptical sea!
     Join the merry inquiry.
     May it be always your maybe!


     Beware the sorry old tree!
     Pluck the sun-kissed daisy!
     To see what —good or not;
      Loves me, or loves me not…

     Beware the sorry old tree!
     Pluck the sun-kissed daisy!
     To see what —good or not;
     Loves me, or loves me not…

Or,
would I grow a hole in my bole
if I ignored the daisies’ call
and followed all into a hollow's hall,
walked with shadows in Fortune’s Fall
as sad old stories flicked across the wall,
smothering the ruby embers in me and all?


When you can’t see what you should see;
when there is no wind to stir your quay;
Which is more suitably true;
a window or a wall about you?


When you can’t see what’s beyond the eye;
when nowhere's so high for your wings to fly;
Which is more suitably true;
a window or a wall about you?

Betrothed though to the wall,
doesn’t a window -whether coy or small-
like a paramour join in love
with those who know but to look how?

If only
you truly want to see,
swim in this skeptical sea!

If an unchartered ocean
engulfs all out of all proportion
yet begs the eye for a little notion
craving revelation in each situation,
why curl before the wall?

If a quay, short of mooring vessels,
is thirsty for a visitor with questions he nestles,
why get drowned in lakes?

If a night sky aquiver in sprightful stars
whispers to you on the heavens’ spars,
why wade in shadows?

If the whole world you can tweedle
through the keen eye of a needle

into a dance of daisied ripple,


why ******* the human art,
why riddle the heart,
why rip it all apart?

© Hirondelle, June 22, 2025
    Arif Hifzioglu

trying to show someone
who cannot see their own beauty
how beautiful they are
is like trying to capture
a picture of the moon.

no matter the angle,
no matter the light,
it’s never the same
as standing beneath the sky yourself.

i wish you could
stand here with me
and look at the moon together

but i can only
send you a photo.
it will never show you what i see.

That feeling of being obligated.
Like a signal mom caring for a child that is not hers.

In the same way you came to me.
For whatever reason you adored me, like a child meeting their favorite superhero.

You admired my works like nobody else.

I admired the love you gave to me.
It was warm and unfamiliar.

So I stayed in bed a little longer.
The look that you gave me was passionate and ready…a burden on my back.

Something I could not repeat with my physicality.

I am a stranger to love and because of that I must vanish.

Leaving an oblivious note that you will read.