FAR_Teacher-Scholar Blog

My Poems of Truth.

This is what knowledge looks like when it comes from the body, the land, and lived time.

These poems were written in moments when I chose to slow down, witness fully, and honor what the body and environment teach me. They are rooted in place, sensation, and lived time.

This is how I make knowledge: through presence, attention, and intentional reflection

This is What it Feels Like to Be Me.

This poem grew out of a moment on one of my walks, when I felt deeply connected to this tree. It felt like it was speaking to me, reminding me to keep moving through the wilderness and to trust my passion, even when it makes me stand out. I don’t try to dominate my surroundings; I show up brightly because that’s how I am. The tree felt the same: rooted, part of the landscape, and passionately visible. It reminded me that I can belong to a larger world without shrinking myself inside it, and that being vivid, attentive, and present is not excess, it's simply who I am.

This is What it Feels Like to Me
12/14/25

This image that I took while on one of my walks feels like a metaphor for how I move through the world.

I am the bright tree at the water’s edge-
rooted, visible, and out of step with what surrounds me.

I carry color in spaces that often prefer shadow
or sameness.

I don’t dominate the landscape,
but I don’t disappear into it either.
I exist in contrast,
and that contrast is not accidental.

The water reflects everything back to me-
sometimes clearly,
sometimes distorted.

I am constantly aware of how I am seen,
how my presence is mirrored,
reshaped, and read through lenses I did not choose.

Still, the reflection is real.
It holds truth,
even when it is heavy.

The larger trees loom,
established and unmoving,
shaping the environment I inhabit.

They do not erase me,
but they make my visibility consequential-
as if my very existence carries weight
and surfaces response.

My brightness is not easy;
it is intentional.

It is the result of staying rooted
while refusing to dim.

I stand at the edge-
between land and water,
certainty and complexity,
action and pause.

I am not neutral,
but I am attentive.

I listen.
I negotiate.
I choose proximity
with care.

What this image reminds me
is that existing in this in-between space
is not weakness-
it is awareness.

This is what it feels like to be me.

Nature Doesn’t Need Permission (Neither Do I)

This poem came from a moment when I intentionally slowed myself down, when I chose to bear witness instead of rushing, to feel time stretch instead of chasing it. Along the Pacific coast, I let myself live inside awe: watching the waves crash, locals surf with ease and courage, the sky shift through sunrise and sunset. I savored what was there--the salt air, the warmth of fresh fish from the sea, the quiet joy of other people moving naturally in a place they belong. Nature reminded me that I don’t need permission to rest, to take up space, or to exist without proving my usefulness. Even when the day is interrupted, even when something unexpected happens, presence and gratitude remain because we all belong to nature. This poem holds that embodied knowing, rooted in witnessing, coexistence, and a refusal to let the moment, or the day, be taken from me.

Nature Doesn't Need Permission (Neither Do I)

10/25/2025

I step away from the daily demands
of a life that insists:
if you’re not hustling,
you’re not surviving.

So I go to the Pacific-
to Lovers Point,
where the sunset widens the horizon
until it feels infinite,
like it’s daring me
to dream bigger.

Waves crash unapologetically,
white froth against a crisp blue sky,
loosening something in my chest.
I’m high-
on salt air,
on this view,
on not being needed
for anything at all.

She reminds me
I need no permission
to swell,
to split open against granite cliffs,
to leave pieces of myself
in salt and stone,
and return to this body
I am hosting.

Surfers paddle out-
freakin brave-
sharing the deep with sharks,
moving like time misplaced them.

Here, the only demand
is to witness:
glory,
stillness,
bliss.

Later,
under a crescent moon,
I sit in a white lawn chair to drink
a cup of hot water in my hands
to wash down the fish
still warm in my belly.
Fog smudges the stars,
the night holding me
like it knows my name.

And then in front of me,
a guy steps out
of his cottage room,
walks to the fence
that borders the forest
and pisses.

Just lets it happen.
Steam rising.
His stance,
confidence unwavering.

He doesn’t see me.
I am maybe
four feet away.
Still.
Witnessing.

I try not to laugh :D

Just like I didn’t need permission
to coexist with crashing waves,
he didn’t need mine either-
to empty his body
into the dark.

My thoughts wobble
for a second.
My mood does not.
Neither does my gratitude.

Because some days
refuse to be taken from you,
even when a drunk stranger
is aggressively peeing nearby.

When My Heart Barks Back

This poem was written after one of the most difficult writing experiences of my life, a required defense of my teaching practices before a personnel committee at an institution I won’t name. It followed being told there was no “curricular need” for me, after I had disrupted expectations in ways I do not regret. It was written during the sweet transition from spring to summer of 2023, while I walked on dried leaves and rested against a tree in my backyard after a long day of mothering, warmed by the sun and held by my children’s laughter.

Blue moon in my left hand,
a drink to match my mood.
Leaves crunch beneath my feet
as I walk to the rhythm of my melancholy--
thinking:

I’ve never done drugs.
Never smoked.
Never slept around.
But something about
Machine Gun Kelly in my ears
speaks to me.

Maybe
he’s who I would’ve become
if I was a dude.
No excuses.
I could get away
with being a douche.

“I’m a 90s baby,
happiness is an illusion,”
he says.

I’m lost now.
I’m tired now.
Tomorrow will be better,
says my hope.

I look up at the evening sky,
eyes hunting answers.

Why am I here?
Where will I go when I die?
Will my children survive this life?

Life sucks today.

My dilemma is I hear the call to rise.
An angel on my right says:
this is your purpose.

A devil on my left whispers:
let someone else do it.

My heart barks back:

No one loves like me.
No one serves like me.
I am not afraid of the dark.

—

I am an exotic Yemenia
drifting through university hallways
that smell like white paper,
wasted trees
telling their stories.

My complexion,
so beautiful
they say,
until I open my mouth.

She was cute
until she spoke.

They prefer spectatorship
over participation
in critical discourse--
discourse that unsettles.

Comfortable
is what they prefer.

Okay.

Comfortable is what you get.
Stay stagnant,
stale and cement,
to a narrative
that never challenges you
beyond your comfort zone.

Pretend you know,
but never really know.

Let me be,
says my heart.

Where Crickets Sing, and No One Listens

This poem reflects on quiet leadership, invisibility, and what it means to remain grounded in spaces that do not always listen or where words are abundant, but action is scarce.

I wrote this while walking near the slough. At one point, I took my earbuds out pausing MGK to take in the landscape: a murky slough, California cattails, and beautiful oak trees. I took this photo in that moment as a reminder that not all who wander are lost.

Where Crickets Sing, and No One Listens

Their sound cuts through MGK's lyrics:
All I know is I don’t know nothing.
People talk, but they don’t say nothing;

So, I watch what they do, instead.

I walk this half-mud, half-grassed path,
the slough thick with duckweed,
green spilling over brown water
where lilies rise
and fall.

I wonder:
Does altruism exist?

If you lead without looking back,
without expecting to be followed,
without needing approval
maybe it does.

But to walk that way
you must root like the cattails
in the slough beside me
filtering what the water carries
and asking nothing in return.

You must stand in the murk
without becoming it.
Bend when the wind moves through you
and remain
when it passes.

Because true leadership
is not loud.
It does not beg to be seen.

It holds the shoreline together
quietly

alone

on a half-mud path,
where crickets sing,
and no one listens.

Arabic Luggah (Language)

Writing Arabic Luggah came from a place I don’t always have words for, but I feel it in my body all the time. That pull to Arabic, that ache, that flutter is real. It’s what happens when something is yours, deeply yours, but not always fully accessible to you.

I wasn’t trying to romanticize language. I wanted to be honest about what it means to live in that tension. Because yes, Arabic connects me to my people, my history, my lineage, but it also reminds me of distance. Of the ways language can make you feel like you belong, and at the same time, like you have to prove that you do.

The dahssa (the step) in the poem matters to me for that reason. My body knows things my tongue sometimes doesn’t. There’s a kind of knowing that lives in movement, in dance, in rhythm, in memory. That’s where I locate myself when my tongue is tied, especially when I don’t have opportunities to speak Arabic in the dialects I was raised in. There are two distinct ones: one for country folk (my father’s land), and one for city folks (my mother’s land, Taiz, belad al-‘izz). Like James Baldwin suggests, your language exposes you.

I also wanted to name something we don’t always say out loud, that we read each other through body language, through dialect, through accent. We decide who belongs and who doesn’t, even within our own communities. This poem sits in that contradiction. It’s not about resolving. It’s about telling the truth of what it feels like to live inside it. That even within the communities we are raised in, we learn to discriminate, often subtly, based on the dialects people use or don’t use.

This reality is uncomfortable, but it’s real. This poem asks the reader to sit with that discomfort and to grapple with those human contradictions rather than look away from them.

Arabic Luggah

When I hear Arabic, my heart flutters,

like a dove lifting into flight, 

like a starving tongue aching for bread it may never taste.

The sound of عربي summons the part of me that sleeps, 

a pulse awakened by the rise and fall of intonation,

a language that stirs something chemical, something ancestral.

Then, flashbacks:

I step,

and step,

to the rhythm of the Yemeni dahssa.

My pride is in that step, 

a signal of who I am,

Taiz, Bahagdan, Sana’a. 

My feet tell my lineage, 

my body speaks my belonging.

We claim identity through dance, 

through the uttering of language,

and we discriminate by dialect, 

by accent, 

by the subtle shifts in speech that say:

"I know you."

"I don’t."

“You belong.”

“You--don’t.”

What It Means to Take Up Space

My reflection on voice and social dynamics within “shared governance” spaces that are often already decided: shaped by power, whiteness, and politeness.

I enter the room softly
not out of fear,
but because the air is already crowded
with the certainty of whiteness,
of power,
of politeness.

Even the brown faces here
soften their accents,
trim their gestures,
fold themselves small
to keep the peace.

Mirror, mirror on the wall
who performs ______ (fill in the blank, reader) most of all?
Not me.

And still,
it feels like high school all over again,
the cliques,
the unspoken territorial of the room
that whispers:
she’s with me,
he’s with her,
don’t sit with us.

Your proximity to ___________ (fill in the blank, reader),
your catering to it,
is what makes you popular, habibi.

I am not sorry,
I refuse to cater
to their cliques.

When I speak,
the table shifts.
The wood remembers
I am not meant to lean on it.

My vowels carry spice and salt,
they roll differently,
curve around sincere

intention,
and still,
they bruise.

A question and a suggestion become an accusation
by the time they reach their ears.
They respond
with professionalism, supposedly,
but I recognize the bitterness in it,
the quiet panic,
the limits of a language
never built to name me.

How dare she!
brown girl who speaks--
question our ways of doing?!

Oops, I did it again.
Be prepared, Fairuze.
Stop being so intentional, so curious--
just walk the line-------------------------------------------------

Still, I breathe.
Still, I choose grace.
Not the submissive kind
mistaken for cowardice
or shameful silence,
but the kind that stands
rooted and unmoved,
the kind that reads the room,
waits its turn,
speaks with precision and
still misunderstood.

I do not cower.
I do not boast.
I stand post.

I widen the room
make it big enough
for truth and tension to sit together,
for difference to mean something
other than danger.

I am not here

to apologize for my presence.

I am here

to remind them

that power sounds different

when spoken in my voice,

it does not overpower,

it does not erase,

it is not indifferent,

it holds space

and still remains.

the voice of a Yemeni daughter,
Yemeni mother,
brown woman,
listener,
speaker,
witness.

Whether in person
or uttered
on white paper,
I will take up
space.

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