Where the Rain Waited - By Zahra Lulat

Written By: zahra lulat

Category: short story

Competition: Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026

In the evocative short story "Where the Rain Waited," Zahra Lulat intricately weaves a tale of love, longing, and the passage of time. As part of the Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026, this narrative explores the emotional landscape of returning home and the fear of what has been lost. With its profound message and vivid imagery, Lulat's work stands as a testament to the enduring power of love and the complexities of human connection.

About the Work

Zahra Lulat's narrative captures the poignant theme of love that transcends time and distance. The story's mood is tender and reflective, evoking a sense of nostalgia and yearning. Through rich imagery and introspective prose, Lulat delves into the emotional intricacies of her characters, painting a vivid picture of their inner worlds. The story's style is both lyrical and deeply moving, inviting readers to ponder the nature of love and the courage it takes to embrace it once again.

where the rain waited

Original Submission by zahra lulat

Where the Rain Waited

A story of the love that stayed.

The first thing I noticed about the meadow was that it had forgotten nothing.

The grass still grew wild beneath the old oak, the same tall weeds brushed against my bare ankles, and the evening sun still spilled through the branches in long, golden ribbons, catching upon the drifting seeds of dandelions and the silver threads of a spider's web. The air was heavy with summer heat, with the sweet, bruised scent of crushed grass and the faint perfume of the roses growing wild along the fence.

It was as though the years had passed over this place without daring to disturb it.

I envied it.

Three weeks had passed since I returned home, and in those three weeks I had discovered that one might return to a place without ever truly coming home.

My father had been ill for a long while, and when his health began to fail, I had gone with him to the coast, where the physicians assured us the sea air might restore what time had begun to take away. I had left in the spring, with a heart full of promises and the foolish certainty that a few months could not change anything that truly mattered.

A few months had become years.

My father had needed me. I had stayed. And the longer I remained away, the more difficult it became to imagine returning to the life I had left behind.

Except, of course, for Damon.

There had not been a day in all those years when I had not thought of him. I had thought of him in the quiet hours before sleep, when the house had fallen still and my father's breathing was the only sound in the darkness. I had thought of him whenever the evening sun turned the sea to gold, whenever I heard a man's laughter in a crowded street, whenever I came across a passage in a book that I knew he would have argued with merely to provoke me.

I had thought of him most when I was happy, because happiness had always seemed incomplete without the possibility of sharing it with him.

And yet I had not written as often as I ought to have done.

At first, I had written frequently. Then my father's illness worsened, and my days became a succession of physicians, medicines, sleepless nights, and the dreadful business of pretending that I was not frightened. My letters grew shorter. His replies, when they arrived, were gentle and patient, filled with questions about my father and assurances that I must not trouble myself about anything else.

He never complained.

Perhaps that was why I had been so careless with his heart. I had mistaken his patience for an endless thing.

The last letter I received from him had been written nearly a year before my father's death. It contained no reproach, no accusation, not even the smallest suggestion that he had grown tired of waiting.

Only one sentence had remained with me.

I hope, whatever the future brings, that you will remember there is still someone here who wishes you well.

Someone.

Not I.

Not Damon.

Someone.

I had read that letter until the paper softened beneath my fingers, wondering whether he had finally ceased to love me, or whether he had merely become too proud to say so.

When my father died, I had been too exhausted by grief to consider returning. Then, when I was finally able to leave the coast, I had delayed another month, and then another, because I feared what awaited me at home more than I feared the loneliness of remaining away.

I could endure missing Damon.

I did not know whether I could endure discovering that I had missed my chance.

And so, when I finally returned, I had expected to find the boy I had loved waiting somewhere in the familiar corners of my childhood.

Instead, I found a man who appeared determined never to be alone with me.

Damon had not left. He had remained in the village, tending to his family's estate, attending the same church, walking the same roads, and living beneath the same sky that had watched me grow older far away. He had been there all along.

And yet, in three weeks, he had scarcely spoken to me.

At the assembly, he had greeted me with a bow so formal that I had nearly laughed from the absurdity of it. At church, he had looked towards me once and then fixed his attention upon the hymnbook in his hands. When our families met for dinner, he had spoken to everyone at the table except me.

I had spent seven years longing to come home.

I had not imagined that home would look straight through me.

Perhaps, I thought, as I lowered myself into the grass beneath the oak, this was the punishment for leaving someone who had never asked me to go.

The sun was sinking. Golden light filtered through the loose strands of my hair, and the warmth of the day lingered upon my cheeks. I drew my knees towards my chest and listened to the rustle of the weeds around me.

This had always been my place to think.

When I was young, I had come here to dream of the life that awaited me. Now I came because I could not bear to think of the life that had already passed.

I wondered whether Damon had loved me through those years.

I wondered whether he had waited.

And, most terribly, I wondered whether he had finally learned not to.

The first drop of rain landed upon my wrist.

I looked up.

Dark clouds were gathering above the orchard, swallowing the last of the sunlight. A cool wind swept through the meadow, bending the grass until it shimmered like a dark green sea. I ought to have returned home, but I remained where I was, watching the rain begin to fall.

Perhaps I wanted the weather to do what I could not.

Perhaps I wanted something to wash away the years between us.

Within minutes, the rain had become a steady downpour. My dress clung to my legs, my hair hung in damp strands about my face, and the chill began to creep beneath my skin. I rose reluctantly and turned towards the path.

That was when I saw him.

A man was walking towards me through the rain, carrying a dark umbrella. His coat was wet at the shoulders, and his hair had fallen untidily across his forehead. He walked with a familiarity that made my heart stumble before my mind had even recognised him.

Then he stepped beneath the fading light.

Damon.

I stopped breathing.

For a moment, neither of us moved. Rain fell between us in silver threads, and the distance separating us seemed at once impossibly small and immeasurably vast.

He looked at me as though he had found something he had long ago taught himself to live without.

Then he hurried forward and raised the umbrella above my head.

"You will catch your death," he said.

His voice was the same.

I hated him a little for that.

"How very kind of you to concern yourself with my health, Mr. Ashford."

His hand tightened around the umbrella.

"Aurora."

"Damon."

The silence that followed was dreadful.

He looked at my wet hair, my trembling hands, the droplets running down my cheeks. His expression changed, and for one brief moment I saw the man I remembered—the one who had always noticed when I was cold, when I was frightened, when I was pretending to be perfectly well.

He shrugged out of his coat.

"Here."

"I do not need—"

"Please."

The word was so gentle that I could not bring myself to refuse. He draped the coat around my shoulders, his fingers brushing my neck, and I fought the sudden, humiliating urge to cry.

He smelled of rain and cedarwood.

He smelled like a memory I had spent years trying not to revisit.

"Thank you," I whispered.

He nodded, looking away.

I could not endure it.

"Have I offended you?"

His gaze returned to mine.

"What?"

"Have I done something to make you despise me so thoroughly that you cannot even speak to me?"

The question escaped before I could soften it. I stood before him, shivering beneath his coat, and wished with all my heart that I had kept silent.

Damon stared at me.

"Despise you?"

"You have scarcely looked at me since I returned."

He let out a breath, almost a laugh, except there was no amusement in it.

"You believe I have avoided you because I despise you?"

"I do not know what to believe. You have given me very little to work with."

He lowered his eyes.

For a long moment, the only sound was the rain beating upon the umbrella.

Then he said, "I have avoided you because I do not know how to stand before you and pretend that I have not spent seven years missing you."

My heart gave a painful lurch.

He continued before I could answer.

"I thought I should be sensible. I thought I would allow you time to settle, that I would wait until you wished to see me. You have been through more than I can imagine, Aurora. Your father—"

His voice faltered.

"I am sorry for your loss. I wanted to tell you so many times, but every time I came close, I feared that my presence would only make things more difficult for you."

I looked at him through the rain.

"And so you said nothing?"

"Yes."

"How remarkably familiar."

He accepted the rebuke without protest.

"I know."

I looked away, my eyes burning.

"I thought you had forgotten me."

He went very still.

Then, with a quietness that frightened me far more than anger ever could, he said, "There has not been a single day in which I have forgotten you."

I turned back towards him.

The umbrella trembled slightly in his hand.

"Aurora, I have tried. God knows I have tried. I have occupied my time with work, with responsibilities, with every respectable pursuit a gentleman might employ to convince himself that he is a reasonable creature. I have attended dinners, managed accounts, visited neighbours, and listened to conversations that seemed to last an eternity."

A faint, broken smile touched his mouth.

"And every time someone asked whether I was happy, I found myself wondering what answer I might give without revealing that I had spent the better part of my life waiting for a woman who might never come home."

My throat tightened.

"Damon..."

"No. Please. I have been silent for long enough."

He looked at me, and there was something in his face I had never seen before. Not the easy confidence of the boy I had known, nor the composed indifference he had shown me since my return.

It was fear.

Not fear of rejection alone, but the terrible fear of a man who has carried a hope for so long that he no longer knows how to survive without it.

"I did not remain here because I was incapable of living without you," he said. "I remained because I could live without you, and I discovered that it was a very poor substitute for being alive."

The words struck me with such force that I forgot the cold.

He looked down at our hands, which were almost touching beneath the umbrella.

"I knew why you had to go. I never blamed you for it. Your father needed you, and you loved him. You did what any good daughter would have done. I would have thought less of you had you chosen me over him."

He swallowed.

"But understanding why you left did not make your absence any easier to bear."

His eyes lifted to mine.

"I would see a carriage coming down the road and wonder, for one foolish second, whether it might be bringing you home. I would hear a woman's laughter in the village and turn before I remembered that it could not possibly be yours. There were evenings when I sat by my window and watched the light disappear from the hills, thinking that somewhere beneath that same sky you were watching the same sunset, and wondering whether I had crossed your mind."

His voice grew unsteady.

"I never knew whether you would return. I never knew whether you still loved me. I did not even know whether I had the right to hope that you might."

He paused, drawing a breath that seemed to hurt him.

"But I hoped, Aurora. I hoped with a desperation that embarrassed me. I hoped through every passing season, through every birthday, through every year that ended without your footsteps upon this road. I hoped even when I told myself that I must stop, because it seemed an unkind thing to do to my own heart."

He gave a small, helpless smile.

"I was never very good at being sensible where you were concerned."

A tear slipped down my cheek.

The rain concealed it, but Damon saw.

He always had.

"I could have asked you to come home," he continued. "I could have written and told you that I missed you, that I needed you, that I was frightened of what might happen if you never returned. But how could I ask you to leave a dying father for a man who had not yet found the courage to tell you what you meant to him?"

He shook his head.

"I could not bear the thought of becoming another burden upon your shoulders. You had enough sorrow to carry. I would not add my longing to it."

He looked at me then, and I saw how much that silence had cost him.

"But I need you to understand something, Aurora. I did not stop loving you because you were gone. I did not love you less when your letters became fewer, or when the months turned to years, or when I began to wonder whether you had found a life in which there was no room for me."

His voice broke.

"If anything, I loved you more painfully. Because I had no place in your life, and still I could not find a place in my heart where you did not belong."

I pressed my hand against my mouth.

He stepped closer, lowering the umbrella slightly as the wind swept the rain beneath its edges.

"I do not know what you feel for me now. I do not know whether the girl who left this village all those years ago would recognise the man standing before her. I have no right to ask you to make up for the time we lost, nor to demand that you return the feelings I have carried in your absence."

He looked at me with such tenderness that I thought my heart might break simply from being seen.

"But I cannot stand before you another day pretending that you are merely an old friend. I cannot greet you politely at dinner and watch you leave a room while every part of me longs to follow. I cannot ask after your health when what I wish to ask is whether you are sleeping well, whether you are lonely, whether there is anything in this world that frightens you, and whether I might be permitted to stand beside you when it does."

His fingers trembled around the umbrella handle.

"I do not want to be the man you remember, Aurora. I want to be the man you can depend upon. I want to be there when you wake from a terrible dream, when grief finds you unexpectedly, when you are tired of being strong and no longer wish to pretend that you can bear everything alone."

His voice fell to a whisper.

"I want to love you in all the moments no one else will ever see."

I could scarcely breathe.

"I want the life that happens after the grand declarations, after the flowers have withered and the music has ended. I want the quiet evenings. The difficult mornings. The days when neither of us has anything extraordinary to say, but I can look across a room and find you there."

He drew closer.

"I want to know that, whatever the world takes from us, I shall not have to spend another night wondering whether you are somewhere beneath the same moon, wishing that I were beside you."

His eyes glistened.

"And if you should ever grow old before me, I shall love the lines time leaves upon your face. If you should lose your beauty, I shall love the face that remains. If sorrow changes you, I shall learn the new shape of your sorrow and love you there, too. If life makes you difficult, or frightened, or weary, I shall not mistake those things for reasons to turn away."

He swallowed hard.

"Because I do not love you for the happiness you might bring me. I love you because you are you. Because somewhere in this enormous, bewildering world, there is one person whose existence makes every other thing seem a little more bearable, and for me, that person has always been you."

The rain fell harder.

Neither of us seemed to notice.

"I have spent years believing that the most courageous thing I could do was wait quietly and ask nothing of you. I thought that if I loved you enough, I could be content simply knowing that you were somewhere in the world, safe and well."

He shook his head, his expression full of a sorrow so honest that it frightened me.

"But I was wrong. I was wrong because love is not always noble when it is silent. Sometimes silence is only fear, and sometimes patience is merely a coward's excuse for never risking the one thing he truly wants."

He looked at me.

"And I want you, Aurora. Not because I have waited, and not because I believe the years entitle me to anything. I want you because if I were granted every happiness this world has to offer, and you were not among them, I should still feel that something essential had been withheld from me."

His voice broke completely on the next words.

"I want to be the person you come home to."

I felt the tears spill down my face.

"I want you to come through my door and know that you need not be brave for me. I want you to tell me when you are frightened, when you are angry, when you are hurting so badly that you cannot find the words to explain it. I want to hold you through the things I cannot mend, and I want to celebrate the things I cannot take credit for. I want to stand beside you not because I believe I can protect you from every sorrow, but because I cannot bear the thought of you believing you must face every sorrow alone."

He lifted one hand towards my face, then stopped, as though even now he feared he had no right to touch me.

"And if you cannot love me, I shall not punish you for it. I shall not make my waiting into a debt you must repay. You owe me nothing for the years I spent hoping."

His eyes searched mine.

"But if there is still some tenderness left in your heart for me, if you have ever wondered whether I remained here thinking of you, then let me tell you now what I was too afraid to write."

He took my hand.

"I never stopped waiting for you to come home."

His lips trembled against my knuckles.

"Not because I was certain you would return. I was never certain of anything. I waited because loving you was the one thing I could not persuade myself to surrender, even when I believed that surrender might be the only sensible thing left to do."

He raised his eyes to mine.

"And now you are here. You are standing before me, and I have spent three weeks behaving as though I might survive losing you a second time."

A tear fell from his cheek.

"I cannot do it, Aurora. I cannot look at you and pretend that my heart is a thing I can command to be quiet."

He bowed his head.

"I love you. I love you with all the parts of me I have never known how to express, with all the hope I tried to bury, and with all the tenderness I have carried through the years you were away. I love you without knowing what tomorrow will bring. I love you without any promise that you will choose me. And if you tell me that your heart has changed, I shall let you go, though I fear it will be the hardest thing I have ever done."

He drew a shaking breath.

"But if you should ask me what I want, if you should ask me what I have wanted in every quiet moment of every lonely year, then I shall tell you the truth."

He pressed my hand against his heart.

"I want a lifetime in which I no longer have to imagine what it would be like to be loved by you."

For a long moment, I could not speak.

I had thought that I would find relief in hearing him say that he had waited. I had imagined that it would soothe some wounded, childish part of me to discover that I had not been the only one counting the years.

I had not understood that his waiting had been its own kind of grief.

He had stayed in the place where I had left him, not because he expected me to return, but because he had never found the courage to stop hoping. And I had been so frightened of discovering that I no longer mattered to him that I had nearly allowed my fear to become another year of silence.

"Damon," I whispered.

He looked up immediately.

I had imagined this moment a thousand times, but no fantasy had prepared me for the sight of him standing before me with rain upon his face and his heart laid bare.

"I thought you had forgotten me."

His expression crumpled.

"Oh, my love."

The endearment broke something open inside me.

"I thought that if you had truly loved me, you would have written more often. I thought that if I had mattered enough, you would have found some way to tell me that you were waiting. And when I came home and you would scarcely look at me, I thought perhaps I had returned too late."

I struggled to draw a breath.

"I was so afraid that I had lost you that I could not bear to ask whether you still wanted me."

He shook his head, tears mingling with the rain.

"You could never have returned too late."

"But you do not know that."

"I do."

He stepped closer, his free hand rising to cup my cheek.

"Aurora, you could have returned to me grey-haired and stooped with age, and I should still have known you. You could have arrived with nothing but a travelling cloak and a broken heart, and I should still have wanted you beside me. You could have come to my door after fifty years, believing that you had no right to knock, and I would have opened it."

His thumb brushed my cheek.

"There is no version of you I would not have wished to see again."

I let out a sob.

"I missed you."

"I know."

"No, you do not." I shook my head, laughing and crying at once. "I missed you in ways I could not explain. I missed you when I was happy, because I wanted to tell you. I missed you when I was frightened, because I wanted you to tell me everything would be all right. I missed you when my father was ill, and I missed you when he died, and I hated myself for wishing that you were there because I knew you could not have changed what happened."

My voice faltered.

"And after he was gone, when I finally had the freedom to return, I was so frightened that you would no longer want me that I delayed coming home. I thought I was protecting myself. I see now that I was only giving fear another year of my life."

Damon's eyes filled.

"I would have wanted you in every one of those moments."

I looked at him.

"Even the terrible ones?"

"Especially the terrible ones."

He pressed his forehead to mine.

"You never needed to come home happy, Aurora. You only needed to come home."

A sound escaped me that was somewhere between a laugh and a sob.

I closed my eyes, leaning into his hand.

"I love you," I whispered. "I have loved you through every year I was away, and I am so sorry I allowed fear to keep me from returning sooner."

He shook his head.

"You had your father to care for. You had grief to bear. You need not apologise for surviving the years that were given to you."

Then, with a tenderness that made my knees weak, he added, "And you need not apologise for being afraid. I was afraid, too."

I opened my eyes.

"I love you, Damon."

He stared at me as though the words had reached some place in him that had been waiting in darkness.

"I love you," I repeated, taking his face between my hands. "And I do not want another year of wondering. I do not want another evening spent imagining the life we might have had. I want the ordinary days. I want the difficult ones. I want to learn who we have become, and I want to discover who we might yet be, together."

His lips parted, but no words came.

I smiled through my tears.

"You have waited long enough, my love."

The umbrella slipped from his hand.

It landed in the grass and rolled away, forgotten.

For one breathless moment, Damon simply looked at me. Then he took my face between his hands, his thumbs brushing my cheeks, and kissed me.

It was a kiss that held no hesitation, no polite restraint, no careful consideration of what might be proper. It was the kiss of a man who had spent years teaching himself to live with an empty space in his heart and had suddenly discovered that the space could be filled.

I clutched his coat, drawing him closer, and felt him tremble as he held me.

When he finally drew back, his forehead rested against mine.

"Say it again," he whispered.

I smiled through my tears.

"I love you."

His eyes closed.

"Again."

"I love you, Damon."

He gave a broken laugh, and then he lifted me into his arms.

I cried out in surprise, wrapping my arms around his neck as he spun me beneath the rain. My laughter was muffled against his collarbone, and I felt his own laughter rumble through his chest as he held me close, turning us both in the wet grass as though the whole world had become too beautiful to stand still.

"Damon!" I cried, laughing. "Put me down!"

"Never!"

"You are going to drop me!"

"I have waited seven years to hold you. You must forgive me if I am reluctant to surrender the privilege."

I buried my face against his shoulder, laughing until I could scarcely breathe. The rain soaked us both, the tall weeds pricked against my ankles, and the scent of crushed grass rose around us, green and sweet beneath the summer storm.

When he finally set me down, he did not release me.

He brushed the wet hair from my face and gazed at me with such unguarded happiness that I felt tears gathering again.

"I have something to ask you," he said.

I raised an eyebrow.

"If you intend to ask whether I shall forgive you for avoiding me, I believe we have already established that I am a woman of questionable judgement."

A smile touched his mouth.

"I am counting upon it."

He took both my hands in his.

"I cannot give you back the years we lost. I cannot undo the loneliness, or the fear, or the nights when you wished I were beside you and I was not. But I can offer you all the years that remain to us."

His voice softened.

"I would like to court you, Aurora. Properly, this time. I would like to visit your family, to ask your father's memory to forgive the years I spent too frightened to speak, and to ask your mother's permission to make you my wife."

I laughed through my tears.

"And if I refuse?"

"Then I shall be obliged to continue loving you from a respectable distance, which sounds considerably more miserable than anything I have yet endured."

"Damon!"

"I am joking, my love."

He kissed my hands.

"Mostly."

I looked at him, at the man who had stayed while I was gone, who had loved me without certainty and waited without a promise. I thought of all the years I had spent believing that time was something that carried love away from us, when perhaps time had only been revealing what remained after everything else had been stripped away.

"Yes," I whispered.

He blinked.

"Yes?"

"Yes, Damon. I will marry you."

For a moment, he seemed unable to comprehend the words.

Then his expression changed, and he drew me into his arms with a sound that was almost a sob.

He held me tightly, his face buried in my wet hair, and whispered my name as though he had been waiting seven years simply to say it without fear.

I wrapped my arms around him.

"You have me now," I murmured.

He pulled back just enough to look at me.

"May I keep you?"

The question was so tender, so heartbreakingly unlike the confident declarations of the gentlemen I had known, that I felt my heart give way entirely.

I touched his cheek.

"You need never ask me that again."

He kissed me once more, slowly this time, as the rain softened around us and the last of the golden light disappeared beyond the hills.

________________

We walked towards home beneath the dripping branches of the orchard, our hands clasped between us.

Damon had retrieved the umbrella, though one of its ribs had bent beyond repair. He carried it rather uselessly at his side, seeming to have forgotten its original purpose.

Every few steps, he looked at me.

Every few steps, I smiled.

At last, I could bear it no longer.

"Why do you keep staring at me?"

He considered the question with all the seriousness of a man examining an important legal document.

"I am attempting to determine whether you are real."

"And what is your conclusion?"

"I remain unconvinced."

I laughed, and he smiled at the sound.

Then he grew quiet.

"Aurora?"

"Yes?"

"If I had written to you and told you how much I missed you, would you have come home sooner?"

I stopped walking.

He looked immediately regretful.

"You need not answer that."

I turned towards him and took his hand in both of mine.

"I do not know," I said honestly. "Perhaps. Perhaps not. I was frightened, and my father needed me, and I had convinced myself that I could not bear to lose anything else."

He nodded.

"I understand."

"But I wish I had known." I squeezed his fingers. "I wish I had known that someone was waiting for me. Not because I would have left my father, but because there were days when I felt so alone that I could scarcely remember what it was like to be loved."

His face softened.

"Then let me tell you now."

He lifted my hand to his lips.

"I am here, Aurora."

My eyes stung.

"I am here when you are happy, and I am here when you are sad. I am here when you are certain of yourself and when you cannot bear the sound of your own thoughts. I am here when you have nothing to say, and when you have so much to say that you cannot find a place to begin."

He pressed a kiss to my knuckles.

"And tomorrow, when the sun rises, I shall still be here."

I rested my head against his shoulder.

For seven years, I had imagined what it would feel like to come home to Damon.

I had never understood that home was not the place where he waited, nor the meadow where we had once dreamed of our futures.

It was the quiet certainty of his hand around mine.

It was the sound of his voice saying my name.

It was the knowledge that I need no longer wonder whether I was loved.

We reached the edge of the orchard just as the clouds began to part. A pale strip of evening sky appeared above the distant hills, and the first stars emerged, timid and silver.

Damon stopped beneath the old gate.

"Come along, my love," he whispered. "Let us go home."

I looked at him, at the man who had remained when I had gone, who had waited when I could offer him no certainty, and who had loved me even when he feared that his love would never be returned.

Then I slipped my arm through his.

"Yes," I said. "Let us."

And as we walked beneath the dripping branches, I understood that the most extraordinary thing about love was not that it could survive years of separation, or that it could make a heart ache with longing, or that it could bring two people together beneath the rain.

It was that, after all the years in which we had been frightened, after all the days in which we had mistaken silence for safety and distance for protection, love had asked us for something so simple, and so difficult, that we had nearly spent our lives refusing it.

The courage to come home.

The courage to wait.

The courage, at last, to say I love you and trust that the words might be enough.

Damon lifted my hand to his lips one final time.

And this time, when he kissed it, I knew I would never again have to wonder whether he would still be there when I returned.

He had waited through the years.

Now, at last, we could begin them together.

About the Competition

The Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026, organized by Hashtag Kalakar, is a celebration of literary talent from around the world. It provides a platform for poets and writers to showcase their creativity and storytelling prowess. The competition invites participants to explore diverse themes and express their unique voices, fostering a global community of creative minds.

We extend our heartfelt gratitude to Zahra Lulat for sharing "Where the Rain Waited" with us. Your participation in the Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026 enriches the tapestry of narratives that touch our hearts. Thank you for inviting us into the world of your characters and for reminding us of the enduring power of love and the courage it takes to find our way back home.

About Hashtag Kalakar

Hashtag Kalakar is a creative platform dedicated to providing artists, writers, singers and other creative talents with opportunities to showcase their work and reach wider audiences through competitions, features and creative initiatives.