“What do you write about when you journal?” Each time the question was asked, it searched for an answer that didn’t exist in my mind. But the question remained for months, dividing and multiplying, growing and metastasizing until my whole body was full of nothing but this question.

My climate anxiety had lessened in my first weeks with the wildlife trust for whom I now work in the mild-mannered wilderness of the English countryside. There was a swelling feeling in September that my life had purpose, that my efforts were meaningful, that there was perhaps still reason for hope in humanity. And then the war broke out…

a time capsule of small moments of the season.

the long walks in ancient woodlands, the airport escapist fiction, the poetry book from Stockholm, the cracking dialogues with ChatGPT, the book of leaves, the ancient epic, and the best book of the summer.

We have all read memoirs by famous authors who bang out 2000 words a day every day and publish a-novel-a-season until they kick the bucket. We have heard these stories and we have lived in awe of them…

In Arabic, my mother tongue, I know the names of three, maybe four, types of birds. Of these, I only know the name for a single songbird. Asfoura -- عصفورة -- is the catchall for small brown songbirds, which I only learned later in life are called sparrows in English.

Perhaps it is the unsolicited reminder of my own fragility, or the sudden waking up of the senses, or the sheer impossibility of writing in full sentences when I am being surreptitiously interrupted by pang after pang of pain… but poetry feels like the only thing I can write when I’m bleeding.

I have spent the first few weeks with this new passport sleeping with it on my bedside table, always within reach. Its insignia glimmers under the orange light of my reading lamp: a lion and a unicorn - animals of fear and fantasy - they are a brandished reminder of my frightening and now unfathomable freedom.

The next time you find yourself looking at a poem, in any context, and feeling uncomfortable, overwhelmed, or even stupid, because you’re asking yourself The Question That Cannot Be Answered: What does this poem mean?

Consider the following…

Never in the history of time and literature has any writer been given any eyeballs for free.

Instead, we have to write words so absurd, so spontaneous and excessive, so borderline-institutionalizably-heinous, that they tempt your eyeballs to stick around.