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Day 3: What I didn’t have a year ago. Photo by Nik Shuliahin on Unsplash ** A year ago, I was in the middle of waiting to get confirmation of the offer of this job, which has led to me being out here now. Between then and now there have been dark days, thanks to the pandemic and all, but overall a year on, I’m out here, largely settled in and have the six-month milestone coming up in a month’s time. Being an expat was something on my bucket list many years ago, so finally getting to do that properly is something I am grateful for.

Day 2: A simple pleasure I am grateful for. Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash. \\\* Getting to attend a virtual meeting in which I had a presentation to give and it being very well received brought to mind the pleasures I have gotten in the past of being the purveyor of esoteric knowledge at times. Small but welcome pleasures.

Something I am looking forward to: By the time I finally upped sticks and headed out to SA by way of Dubai, I felt fed up to my ears with the corner of Surrey in which I had spent the past three months, looking forward to the journey that lay ahead of me. Now that I have spent four months and counting without being able to go anywhere really, the attractiveness of that place shines through and through. I am grateful to be able to call that city home. For that I am grateful, and look forward to a return there at some stage.

For Day 30 of the November Poem-A-Day Challenge. Photo by Marco Ceschi on Unsplash. After Dilruba Ahmed \\\* And I am learning to forgive myself, to not let the weight of the worries of the world hang heavy on my head, to accept that sometimes the broken things around my feet are the world being itself, that sometimes beauty slips out like light through a cracked down from the riven parts of a fragile bowl, ...

Photo by Hannah Olinger on Unsplash. For Day 14 of the November Poem-A-Day Challenge ** Her voice is an echo from afar, the song one that I remember her singing over me. Sleep - child sleep, London bridge is falling down, black sheep have no wool for you. The world has snatched her presence but the memories etched in the linings of my mind linger and remain.

Photo by Olesia Misty on Unsplash. For Day 13 of the November Poem-A-Day Challenge ** You have carried yourself into a far country untethering yourself from the strings of domesticity and caring and the hold of warm soup bubbling over the warm embers of Mother’s hearth. You have dragged your portion of our things over the misty mountains into a strange place where the voice of the Matriarch is obscured by the cooing of the birds and the singing of the sirens. ...

Photo by Douglas Bagg on Unsplash. For Day 7 of the November Poem-A-Day Challenge. ** may the ones that death took this time not have been lost in vain. may the scars etched into our bodies, our minds and our skins by the daily pressure of oppression be a reminder of what was but no longer is, because this time we pressed through against the odds and found light for the future ones.

Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash. For Day 6 of the November Poem-A-Day Challenge. \\ and so I find myself falling, arms flailing desperately trying to find solid ground clutching at the air as though it, perchance, might become a rock beneath my feet. in the moment vertigo wins the battle for my mind, I awake with a jolt. It has been a dream.

Dunnottar Castle. For Day 5 of the November Poem-A-Day Challenge, a poem about beautiful ruins. ** You come from afar bearing the gift of your open self to this place from whence they say the honours of the land once slipped, hid in the hem of a buxom lady’s dress. What you see are its tired walls straining against the pressure of the wind, clinging with their last lives to the cliffs that saved them from past wars. ...

Photo by Danielle MacInnes on Unsplash. For Day 4 of the November Poem-A-Day Challenge. ** Learn which voices to let escape the guards around your ears. Accept the things which return, their hold unyielding. Breathe, because the things the heart beats for are the things which leave it raw.