In the first week of my poetry class, we were told that all astonishing poems have one common element: an awareness of our human mortality, of our inescapable deaths. Dickinson, Poe and Whitman understood this; Pablo Neruda, Sylvia Plath and Allen Ginsberg understood it, too. To them, ignoring death as a theme in their works would have been like standing in a hurricane and insisting that it was a good day to catch a tan.

To avoid it, in other words, would have made their poems the same as 99.9 percent of the poems ever written: forgotten.

If our lives are like poems — and I think they are, with their melodic bursts of beauty and poignancy, sadness and truth — then Farhat Hamidullah was one of the greatest poets I’ll ever know.

Though I’m certain she was not aware that death would greet her when it did last week, she lived as if she knew it was coming soon. Like a poet who works to pack as much meaning and emotion into as few words as possible, she lived as if each day was a chance for her to add a phrase here, change a word there, or start a stanza that would surprise us all. Her poem may have been short, yes, but Emily Dickinson wasn’t wordy, either.

A refugee from Afghanistan who also lived nine years in Turkmenistan, she had to grow up faster than most of us did. Because her English was further along than the English of her family members when she arrived in Tennessee as a 16 year old, she became a voice for her family. Working nearly full time at a shoe store during high school, she managed a 3.3 grade point average — something I struggle to do with only six hours of work each week.

According to her roommate, Farhat expressed frustration at not being able to be more involved in high school because of her developing language skills and time constraints from her job.

But when she arrived at Western three years ago, any semblance of this frustration disappeared as she launched herself into the fabric of this campus and became a figure of welcome and energy within every sphere she inhabited.

When I was a student worker at the International Center and became involved with the International Club, she was one of the first people to welcome me into the group. She later became a student worker at the International Center too and president of the International Club, where she was quick to laugh and slow to judge, just as she was with her friends.

With her startling green eyes, wavy midnight hair and olive skin, I thought I would never understand her beauty. I also thought I’d never understand her strong commitment to her family, her friends, her faith and this university. As I grew to know her and became her friend, however, and as I continue to learn more about her now, I realize that her magic came from her heart. Great poems are like that, after all, especially the ones we never forget.