Pip: Hirahcares — a site that meets you where the heavy stuff lives, and doesn't flinch.
Mara: This episode comes from Hirah's Light – Shining hope for special needs families, and today we're sitting with one piece of creative writing: a dream, a moment of fear, and the words that outlast both.
Pip: Let's start with what it feels like to be inside the aquarium.
Inside the Aquarium
Pip: The poem drops you into a dream — glass walls, rising water, dolphins closing in — and asks what you reach for when you don't know what comes next.
Mara: The poem builds to that question directly. After the fear arrives, she whispers: "La hawla wa la quwwata illa billah — There is no power or strength except through God."
Pip: And the dream answers. The water clears, the dolphins vanish, and she's standing near an opening in the sky. The phrase doesn't explain the fear away — it just shifts what's holding her.
Mara: What the poem does carefully is keep the threat real. The dolphins don't turn friendly. The water doesn't become warm. It simply disappears. The relief isn't comfort — it's release.
Pip: There's a structural choice worth naming: the poem ends twice. Once inside the dream, when she moves toward the light, and once when she opens her eyes and the room is still.
Mara: And then a third beat — the words remain. The water is gone, the dolphins are gone, but the poem closes on the phrase itself, broken across three short lines, as if to slow the reader down into it.
Pip: That's the whole argument, really — that a dream dissolves but the thing you said inside it doesn't.
Mara: It's a poem about what survives waking up. The fear was real, the exit was real, and the phrase she reached for is the only thing that crosses back through.
Pip: For a site built around families carrying hard things, that's not a small idea to put into verse.
Mara: A dream that ends with words still standing — that's the image this one leaves behind.
Pip: Next time, we'll see what else from this corner of the internet holds its shape after the moment passes.
Hirahcares 