Eight short lines, and the argument turns on one word: "away." Faryal Gohar's opening line says that loved ones "go away," but by line six the poem has corrected itself: "They are not away." The title, "They are here," is the answer the poem has been building toward. Grief begins by believing in distance, and the poem spends the rest of its length closing it.
It does this through a quick tour of the world. The dead become "shine in the stars," then "blossom in the flowers," then ride "the cold breeze that blows, / Before the rain starts." The direction of travel is sky, ground, air, so there is nowhere the speaker could look without finding them. "Shine" is used as a noun, which is slightly unexpected. The dead do not become a star but the brightness itself, as if what remains of a person is a quality rather than an object. "Blossom" is a verb of growth, so loss is made to flower. The breeze is the odd one out. It is "cold," and it arrives just before rain. Judging by the imagery, rain stands in for tears, which would place the loved ones at the edge of the storm, felt as a shiver on the skin just before weeping begins. It is the least cosy of the three images, and probably the most honest.
Then the poem turns inward. "They are actually in our broken parts." Until now the comfort has been outside us, in nature. Now it moves into the self. The word "actually" appears twice, in lines two and seven, and it gives the voice a conversational, insistent tone, like someone gently correcting a friend who has got something wrong. The speaker is not offering a metaphor to admire but a fact to be believed.
The poem has no regular metre. Lines swell and shrink, from the nine syllables of the opening to the five of "Before the rain starts." That short line works as a held breath, a pause before the weather it names. The rhyme is loose but audible: "stars," "starts," "parts" and "scars" share the same open "ar" sound, spread through the poem like a note struck again and again. The pair that matters most is "stars" and "scars," at the start and end of the sequence. They differ by a single letter, and swapping one consonant takes us from light in the sky to a mark on the skin. The poem seems to suggest that these are close kin, since the person who is the shine above is also present in the healed wound below. Meanwhile "away" is repeated rather than rhymed, which makes the reversal between line one and line six easy to hear.
Grammar also does quiet work. Six of the eight lines begin with "They" or "And they," so the dead are literally the subject of the poem, and the living only appear as "our" and "us" near the end. When the pronouns finally shift to the speaker's side, the poem has moved from looking outward to looking at ourselves.
The last line is the boldest: they "make us fall in love with the scars." Scars are usually things we hide, so loving them is a paradox. Notice too the progression from "broken parts" to "scars," since a scar is a wound that has closed. Without announcing it, the poem sketches the slow passage of grief from break to mark. "Fall in love" borrows the language of romance for something we would expect to resent, as though a scar were evidence that someone mattered enough to leave a trace.
The images of stars and flowers are familiar ones, the stock comforts of consolation poetry, and the poem's plain, unshowy language keeps it within that tradition. Its real strength lies in the final two lines, which refuse to pretend the hurt has vanished. The pain does not disappear. It becomes the place where the lost person lives. For a young reader, that offers a way of thinking about loss that is neither denial nor despair, and it is a thought small enough to remember.