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Noor-Ul-Ain Sahi Poem
Life is the art of dying-
not the kind that closes the eyes,
but the kind that leaves them open,
watching.
It begins quietly.
So quietly you mistake it for growing up.
A softness goes missing.
A belief fails to return.
Something unnamed steps out of you
and never explains itself.
You learn to live with less
before you learn what was taken.
Life does not kill you—
it thins you.
It teaches erosion.
How to wear down a soul
until it fits neatly
inside obligation and routine.
We die in places no one mourns.
In sentences we swallow.
In love we ration.
In dreams we stop defending
when they ask too much of us.
Each year removes a layer
and calls it experience.
Each loss is framed as necessary.
Each wound is expected to heal
even when it never closes.
You become familiar with absence.
You stop asking where things went.
You stop noticing how empty
the room inside you has become
because emptiness is quieter
than grief.
Life is the art of dying
because it demands rehearsal—
daily,
relentless,
without consent.
You practice disappointment
until it feels natural.
You practice silence
until your voice forgets its shape.
You practice being overlooked
until being seen feels intrusive.
There are deaths with no aftermath.
No moment of recognition.
Just a slow rearranging
around the damage.
Hope does not leave dramatically.
It dims.
It learns how to sit still.
It becomes something you remember
rather than something you reach for.
You do not survive life—
you acclimate to it.
You learn how to function
with fractures holding everything together.
You learn how to move forward
without expecting arrival.
Life is the art of dying
because nothing is ever taken all at once.
It is removed piece by piece
until one day
you cannot remember
what you were before the subtraction began.
And there is no ending to this.
No resolution.
No lesson waiting at the bottom.
Just the continuation—
a body still breathing,
a soul keeping count,
and a quiet understanding
that the art
was never meant
to be finished.
Copyright © Noor-Ul-Ain Sahi | Year Posted 2026
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Noor-Ul-Ain Sahi Poem
I’m afraid
I am rotten.
Not on the surface-
no, I learned early
how to look intact.
I learned how to smile
without cracking,
how to speak softly
so no one hears
the decay working underneath.
Rot is quiet.
It doesn’t announce itself.
It happens slowly,
patiently,
in places no one checks.
I worry there is something in me
that spoiled before it was ever loved.
Something that went bad
from waiting too long
in the dark.
Something that learned
how to survive neglect
but not how to stay whole.
People touch me
and pull their hands back
eventually.
They never say why.
They just sense it-
that faint wrongness,
that soft collapse behind the ribs,
like fruit bruised too deeply
to recover.
I try to be careful.
I try not to leak.
I wrap myself in kindness,
in humor,
in good behavior-
as if sweetness on the outside
might cancel out
what’s fermenting within.
But rot doesn’t disappear
because you are gentle.
It doesn’t stop
because you are trying.
I replay every loss
like evidence.
Every leaving.
Every almost-love
that stalled and spoiled.
I ask myself
what they smelled
that I couldn’t.
Maybe I stayed unopened too long.
Maybe I trusted the wrong warmth.
Maybe something essential in me
was never meant
to survive this air.
I am afraid I am rotten
because no matter how deeply I clean,
there is a sadness
that keeps resurfacing-
not sharp,
not dramatic,
just sour and persistent.
The kind that settles in the chest
and convinces you
this is who you’ve always been.
This is what happens
when something good
is left waiting
too long to be chosen.
I fear love will arrive,
finally,
and find me already ruined.
That it will press gently
and feel the give.
That it will apologize
with its eyes
and turn away.
So I keep myself closed.
I keep myself cool.
I pretend preservation
is the same as safety.
But at night,
when everything is quiet enough
to tell the truth,
I press my hand to my chest
and wonder-
was I always like this,
or did the world
teach me
how to spoil?
I’m afraid
I am rotten.
And more afraid still
that no one will ever tell me
I am not.
Copyright © Noor-Ul-Ain Sahi | Year Posted 2026
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Noor-Ul-Ain Sahi Poem
The flowers died Monday.
Their heads bowed first—
a quiet, obedient surrender.
No new bouquet at my front door.
No doorbells ringing
to announce beauty had survived another night.
Only stems stiff with memory
and petals already learning
how to disappear.
I ordered a new bouquet.
It was supposed to come Friday.
I told myself that meant something.
Tuesday, the quiet arrived.
Not the peaceful kind.
The kind that sharpens itself.
The kind that presses its ear to your chest
and waits for you to notice it listening.
The kind that screams
without making a sound
and reminds you
why you keep yourself busy—
why stillness has always felt
like a threat.
Wednesday, I picked up the pen.
I wrote what the silence whispered
when it realized I was alone.
I learned how my mind speaks
when no one interrupts it.
How it doesn’t comfort—
it catalogs.
It names things carefully,
as if preparing an inventory
for a future without me.
Thursday, understanding arrived
without mercy.
It wasn’t just the world decaying.
Not just humanity unraveling
in polite daylight.
It was me.
I was dying slowly—
the safest way to die.
No spectacle.
No witnesses.
Just erosion disguised as routine.
Friday came.
The bouquet didn’t.
I let the silence sit beside me.
Let it breathe my air.
Let it tell me its secrets—
how it grows fed on neglect,
how it seeps into bone,
how it doesn’t rush
because it knows it will win.
By then, it had reached the marrow.
Saturday, I picked up the pen again.
But this time, the words cut back.
Sharp as the tip they bled from.
Each line a confession
I didn’t know I was making.
Each sentence a small wound
that refused to close.
Sunday, I realized the truth.
I was already among the walking dead-
the kind that resets the countdown
by breathing,
by letting the heart continue
out of muscle memory.
The kind that keeps choosing tomorrow
not because they want it,
but because habit is louder than despair.
Then Monday returned.
The bouquet arrived—
dead.
Petals collapsed inward,
soft with decay.
Stems bent beneath a spine
too weak to remember how to stand.
The thorns were still sharp, though—
sharp enough to stab their own leaves,
sharp enough to prove
some things survive
only to cause damage.
But the flowers weren’t
the only thing that arrived dead that night.
Something left me
when I opened the door
and took the bouquet into my hands.
Something quiet.
Something essential.
Now the room smells like rot.
And I can’t tell
which of us is more gone—
me,
or the flowers
that died
on Monday.
Copyright © Noor-Ul-Ain Sahi | Year Posted 2026
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Noor-Ul-Ain Sahi Poem
Dead people get more flowers than the living
because regret is stronger than gratitude—
I think about that often,
how the world waits for a pulse to still
before it remembers
it should’ve cared.
I’ve seen it happen in slow motion:
the sudden sanctification of a name,
the rush to rewrite history
with softer hands,
the way strangers drape roses
over a silence
they never bothered to fill
when it was breathing.
Funny, isn’t it?
How no one notices your absence
until it becomes permanent.
How they praise your light
only after it’s gone out,
as if the dark makes you holy.
Dead people get more flowers—
bouquets layered thick
with apologies too late to matter,
with love that finally found its voice
when there was no one left to hear it.
I wonder sometimes
if the living feel that weight—
if they sense the future wreaths
already being woven,
petal by petal,
from the things no one said.
I wonder if that’s why
some of us walk around
like ghosts-in-training,
learning early
how to haunt the rooms
we were never truly welcomed in.
Maybe that’s the tragedy:
we’re all waiting to be mourned
before we’re celebrated.
We’re all starving for affection
that only seems to bloom
over a grave.
Regret is louder.
It shouts across time,
it claws at the throat,
it forces even the indifferent
to tremble.
Gratitude whispers.
It assumes there will always be
another day,
another chance,
another breath
to say what matters.
But breath is fragile.
Timelines snap.
Hearts fail in quiet rooms
while unanswered messages
glow like tiny tombstones
on a screen.
And then the flowers come—
arms full, extravagant,
perfumed confessions
of everything too late.
I think about this often:
how simple it would be
to love the living
with the same urgency
we reserve for the lost.
How many souls would soften
if someone handed them daisies
not because they died—
but because they stayed.
How many people would feel seen
if their name didn’t need
a memorial
to become beautiful.
But this is the way of the world:
we notice the cracks
only when the vessel breaks.
We count the blessings
only after the blessing
is gone.
Dead people get more flowers—
I suppose because regret
blooms fast and wild,
a frantic garden planted
in the soil of too-late.
Gratitude grows slower.
It needs attention,
presence,
care.
And some people
only learn to love
the moment
love has no one left
to reach.
Copyright © Noor-Ul-Ain Sahi | Year Posted 2026
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