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Syed Zaman is a graduate of Sofia University and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.  He writes, “I currently work in academia at Harvard University. I enjoy exploring creativity through contemplative photography, drawing, word-play, and working as a creativity coach. While in constant engagement with writing, I feel words carrying me forward to places where I am able to articulate to myself that which helps refine a consciousness that is capable of registering the most minute changes in sensation and feeling through a sense of self with an enlarged sense of creative identity.”

Same

Syed Zaman

The pain of loss

The love that was felt

The memories that are left—

It is all the same.

The choices made to numb

The pain—the questions—

What more could I have done?

What else should I have said?

They, too, are all the same—

As if stopping the heart from being heard.

To breathe long and slow

To wipe away those salty tears

To lose all sense of what to say

To feel lost in every conceivable way

It is still

The same.

Still breathing

As visions fade—

As memories erode—

As those bittersweet scents evaporate

To release love into the vicinity of its proximity

Noticing how things that were once important suddenly

Become not so.

How foreign it feels.

How strange it becomes

As if patches of blue amongst gray.

It is almost always the same.

— Syed Zaman

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To have your work considered for the Lyrical send it to:
Doug Holder, 25 School St.; Somerville, MA 02143
dougholder@post.harvard.edu