Most poems about pain ask us to look at the wound. This one asks us to look at the face of someone who is smiling and to wonder what it cost. In «tell me how», nausha ameen sets up a puzzle: some people speak about happiness with conviction, their eyes bright as they talk, yet the only thing they carry is "pain and heartbreaks". The title is almost a plea: tell me how that is possible. The poem's answer is not an explanation but a single, tentative picture of flowers growing after a forest fire.
The first stanza is one long sentence with no punctuation and no capital letters. It begins in brightness, with "strength and everlasting sparkle / inside their eyes", and only then does the grammar turn on the word "when": "when the only thing they carry is / pain and heartbreaks". Because the pain is delayed, we meet these people the way the world meets them, seeing the sparkle first and the weight only on a closer look. The line breaks add to this. "deep inside" ends a line by itself, and "their heart" arrives on a line of its own beneath it, as if the hurt has been pushed down the page and out of sight.
The word choices are small but exact. The people "talk about" happiness, and the poem never says they feel it, which leaves a gap between what is said and what is carried. "Carry" makes pain a physical load, and "only" makes it sound total, with nothing else in the bag. "Everlasting" is a huge word for a sparkle, and placed beside the heartbreak it makes us either marvel or doubt. "Heartbreaks" is plural, which suggests this has happened more than once. The poem has no rhyme and no fixed rhythm. Its long, flowing third line ("with strength and everlasting sparkle") contrasts with short, dropping phrases like "deep inside", so the voice sounds like quiet thinking aloud rather than a performance.
The second stanza is only three lines, and the change of scale matters. After a long, heavy sentence, the poem lightens into one image. A forest is large, old and slow to grow, and a fire can destroy it quickly. Flowers are among the smallest and softest things in it. That the soft thing is what returns is the poem's quiet paradox. The word "still" carries much of the meaning, because it says that after everything, growth continues. There is also a gentle echo of sound in "flowers", "forest" and "fire", three f-words in two lines, so the destroyer and the survivor are tied together by the same breath. A reader who knows that burnt ground can be fertile may find another layer, that the loss itself feeds the new growth, though the poem never says so.
The most honest word in the poem is "perhaps". The speaker has just asked "how" and does not pretend to know. The flowers are a guess, not a slogan. This guess also settles an ambiguity the first stanza leaves open. Are these people wearing a mask, or is their happiness real? Flowers are not painted on. They are living things that rise out of the damage, not a cover laid over it. The sparkle in the eyes and the blooms in the ash seem to be two versions of the same light.
This is what makes the poem worth reading. It avoids two easy ideas: that happy people must have had easy lives, and that people in pain must look broken. It does not praise suffering or say that pain is secretly a gift. It simply notices that strength and sorrow can sit in the same person at the same moment, and that a bright voice can come from a burnt place. For a reader your age, the poem works as a small lesson in looking at people. The cheerful classmate, the friend who laughs easily, the relative who talks about hope might be those flowers. And the poem's last move is to leave "how" unanswered, trusting us to keep asking it of the people around us.