a place to hold words

fatima aamer bilal, excerpt from moony moonless sky’s ‘i am an observer, but not by choice.’

First: I killed a plant once because I gave it too much water. Lord, I worry that love is violence.

Second: like my favorite cup / that i held a little too tightly / because i was afraid that it / would fall and break into pieces. / It shattered in my hands.

"Though my soul may set in darkness

it will rise in perfect light;

I have loved the stars too truly to be fearful of the night."

“When my husband died, because he was so famous and known for not being a believer, many people would come up to me – it still sometimes happens – and ask me if Carl changed at the end and converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I will see him again. Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don’t ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting. Every single moment that we were alive and we were together was miraculous – not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries of chance… That pure chance could be so generous and so kind… That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space and the immensity of time… That we could be together for twenty years. That is something which sustains me and it’s much more meaningful… The way he treated me and the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other and our family, while he lived.

That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday.

“And God looked the other way”

I don’t want to get out

without a broken heart.

I intend to leave this life

so shattered

there’s gonna have to be

a thousand separate heavens

for all of my flying parts.