Some poems aren’t so much read as heard from somewhere inside you. You find them written down and assume you’re reading someone else’s words — until a strange feeling creeps in: this poem was written for you, specifically, as if in the very language of something stirring in your chest that never had a name.

That’s how I came across this poem years ago, and that’s how new readers still find it every day. A poem of longing that breaks the silence with a single sigh: Ayoh..

The Poet — A Seeker of Rhythm

Ahmed Ali Al-Mane’i

Electrical engineer — amateur poet from Tabuk, Saudi Arabia

Born in 1981 in a small village in the Tabuk region. He never studied literature, nor made a profession of poetry — instead choosing a completely different path: electrical engineering. Yet poetry, it seems, never quite let him go.

Al-Mane’i describes himself with a single phrase that leaves no room for more: a seeker of rhythm. It’s a definition that carries a whole philosophy — rhythm here isn’t just meter and rhyme, but a way of listening to the world with a different ear, and turning what is heard into what is felt.

What sets his work apart is that it has stayed untouched by the pull of fame; his poems are scattered, gathered into no collection, and his public readings are rare. And yet his poems have spread by word of mouth and digital sharing — the way songs that genuinely move people spread — not because their author chases an audience, but because people keep finding their own voices inside them.

“Ayoh” — When a Sigh Becomes a Word

It’s said that the celebrated Saudi vernacular poet Khalid Al-Faisal was the first to bring this word into contemporary Arabic art, in his famous sung poem: “Ayyuh.. my heart aches for you.” Ahmed Al-Mane’i found in it an ideal gateway into this poem — because it acts before it speaks, and is felt before it’s understood.

Al-Mane’i doesn’t write about longing to explain it — he writes to prove it’s real, and that what can’t be described can, at times, still be spoken.