The Harvest of Your Ghost

Dad,
Did you have to lay your hammer down so soon,
And quit the road while mine was barely paved?
I never learned the true note of your voice,
Nor how your laughter caught the light of day.
I ask the wind, but the wind won’t talk to me.

They tell me that we move across the earth the same,
A heavy shoulder, a loose and measured swing,
An inherited grace that only blood can take.
They say the gap between my teeth is yours,
And that my eye for color,
Was a dye cast deep in the well of my bones.
I take their word, I search for the traces of you in the mirror.

Three years old is barely time to learn a face,
Much less the weight of wisdom or of flaws.
I still build a life of what-ifs in the dark,
What stories would you have pressed into my palms?
Which of your fires would you have wanted me to keep?
And what soft, breaking things would you have spared me?
Would we have stood as one against the dark,
A league against the world’s sharp edge?

This grief is a slow rust, it eats at the joints.
It settles in the wood time forgot to shape.
And god, it burns to know you stepped away
Just as the world began to hold its breath,
Before you taught me how to plant my feet
Or find the architecture of a man.

But here I am, I walk the line you drew,
Wearing half your face.
And I hope, as the seasons stack their weight,
You rest somewhere unburdened,
Knowing I am the harvest of your ghost.

@doddyokelo

A Peace I Cannot Take Yet

The world was a thief in a velvet cloak,
It took the bread, the wine, the light.
It turned to ash the words I spoke,
And left me shivering in the night.
I gave my gold, my grace, my years,
To hands that only learned to take,
Until the well of all my fears
Ran dry within an empty lake.

I do not fear the quiet dark,
The ending of the breath and bone,
I do not dread the final spark
That leaves the weary traveler prone.
The grave is but a silent bed,
A place where treachery must cease,
Where heavy hearts and aching heads
Are folded in a shroud of peace.

But oh, the faces at the door,
The ones who hold my tattered name.
I fear the shadow on their floor,
The snuffing of their candle flame.
For though the world has stripped me bare
And traded kindness for a stone,
Their love is all the breath and air
That I have ever truly known.

I stay for them. I bear the weight.
I walk the miles I cannot stand.
I bar the final, silent gate
With nothing but a trembling hand.
It isn’t death that makes me weep,
Or shadows where the spirits roam;
It’s knowing, if I fall to sleep,
I leave a broken house for home.

@doddyokelo

After the Breath

The geometry of the bed is a lie, it holds only the shape of a departure.
I watched the light retreat from your skin, a slow tide pulling back
to expose the salt-crusted stones of a world without you.
There is a peculiar violence in a peaceful end,
the way the air refuses to shatter when the lungs stop their labor,
leaving me to inhabit the hollows you forgot to take with you.

God is a name I whispered into the hollow of your cooling throat,
not in prayer, but as a placeholder for the scream I held behind my teeth.
How strange to offer gratitude for the theft of one’s own heart,
to thank the North Wind for finally extinguishing the candle
simply because the wick had grown tired of the burning.
The mercy of death is a broken glass, it heals the wound by removing the limb.

Now the moors are just a distance to be crossed without a destination.
I am a weight dragging across a seafloor of soft, grey ash,
tethered to a ghost who has finally found her Shore.
The breathless war is over, what remains is the terrifying calm,
the realization that the horizon has folded its wings
and I am the only thing left moving in a landscape turned to stone.

@doddyokelo

Broken

The cruelest wound 2026 has seared
is the silence where your voice belongs.
You posted just yesterday that you’d overcome,
and I believed you with every fiber of my being.
You always rose when life tried to break you,
I never imagined this fall would be the last.

Why now, while our shared dreams still wait for us?
I was so certain of our next meeting.
But grief is my shadow now.
It is a heavy, unbearable thing to watch
the boys I grew up with become
stories cut short before the ink could dry.
We were built from the same soil,
we learned the world together, fought its battles together.

Awuoro Thoo! My heart finds no softer word for this.
The last time, you said you were okay,
or at least, you looked okay.
And when you said you’d overcome,
I held enough faith for the both of us.
Now, your absence sits like lead in the room,
and the waves of loss keep crashing in.

My heart bleeds, I am shattered.

Rest well, Wuod Ombija.

@doddyokelo

Give Me Time

Give me time,
hold the reins soft in your hands.
I’m moulding a future from raw clay,
shaping it with my own hands,
climbing a hill I never stop sliding from.

Be patient with me.
I am giving the last of my breath to build more breath,
praying into the night with worn hope,
waiting for heaven to write back.

God will answer,
I feel it burning somewhere just beyond reach.
But pressure?
Pressure will crush the promise before it flowers.
It will sour the love we planted,
bruise it until it tastes like curse instead of blessing.

Don’t turn your eyes toward the neon world,
the staged lives and filtered fantasies.
You know we feast from little,
yet I still stretch it into something sweeter
so you can glimpse the life I swear I’m carving for us.

But if you make my ribs your stepping stones,
if you demand the world today,
I might not survive to see tomorrow.

I don’t want to die young.
I need silence, space, and peace,
not to escape you,
but to return with enough abundance
to lift us both
into the life that waits.

So hold me gently,
walk beside me,
and one day,
we’ll rise together.

@doddyokelo

Rivers of My Own Making

There is no universe in which I am sitting down to read how someone built a whole cereal shop from a single grain of rice. Never. I respect the effort it took to type all that optimism, but no. Your road doesn’t bend like mine, and I refuse to be shamed into feeling inadequate simply because my idea of joy moves to a different sun. If you want to pray, pray. I pray too, my brother. We are all sinners anyway. The only difference is how we manage our sins. Mine are personal. I enjoy them quietly and carry the consequences alone. Yours arrive with collateral damage, cloaked in lies, dipped in theft, and sanctified from the pulpit. A pastor from hell, if we’re being honest. Cut me some slack, man.

2025 has been incredible. Financially, the fireworks stayed away, but the lessons arrived on time. Lessons that stay. I learned how to take care of myself by leaning into what I love. I learned that some opinions bloom like flowers but are made of dust, pretty to see, hollow to hold. I learned the strength that lives in subtle sighs, the subtle mastery in watching without interference, the rare discipline of letting words fall around me without reaching for a reply. And perhaps the hardest lesson of all. When the lights dim, the applause fades, and the crowd vanishes into the night, only your own shadow remains. That truth seeps in like a silent river, carrying its weight with quiet insistence, tracing the contours of the soul, unseen yet unstoppable, leaving freedom in its wake.

I carry no resolutions scribbled on paper for 2026. Free of banners of ambition and untouched by public drumbeats, I carry instead intentions. I plan to be better. To build myself financially. To chase what I want without hesitation or apology. And yes, I plan to cut people off, gently but firmly, when their presence drains more than it gains. Whether I leave or stay, your life will continue uninterrupted. I’ve made peace with that long ago. I plan to do more business, take bolder risks, and travel wider, seeing places for their stories, feeling the streets beneath my feet, tasting lives outside my own. Unfettered by heralded plans, letting the quiet flowering of my journey reveal its own story.

Still, gratitude stays. Deeply. For the hands that steadied me when my footing slipped. For those who pulled me out of trenches without demanding explanations. For those who trusted my strength enough to place opportunity in my hands. For that, a special medal goes to Sheila Chepkirui Yegon. Some people are mere passing notes in your life, others are chords that resonate. Sheila is a river of melodies, a living network that carries you forward, flowing steady, connecting what was, what is, and what could be. May God widen her path and multiply her grace.

And always, my brother Stephen Ochieng (Soo Ochieng), take your flowers, bana. Always. We remain stubborn believers in the impossible, still dreaming with the audacity of people who refuse to shrink their visions too early.

This isn’t a storm, it’s alignment,
It’s growth,
It’s choosing your lane, and driving without explaining the route.

Solo Drive

I’ve marked no map with ink or public pride,
To show the woods where I intend to go.
The things I seek have nowhere left to hide,
And what I reap is what I choose to sow.
I take the path where fewer shadows bide,
And leave the crowds to talk of what they know.
The fence I mend is built of quiet stone,
To keep the peace and part the draining guest.
A man can walk a standard mile alone,
And find in silence all he needs of rest.
For every seed of will that I have grown,
I ask no leave to put it to the test.
So let the wheels engage their rhythmic song,
Across the hills and through the turning lane.
I owe no word to prove where I belong,
Or why I chose the sun above the rain.
The drive is short, the inner light is strong,
I go my way, and need not explain.

@doddyokelo

Jowi Jamuomo

I went, though my heart dragged its feet through sorrow,
I went, because love called my name through the crowd.
They said, Agwambo is gone, but how can truth perish?
How can wind vanish from the lake that bore it?
There he lay, Agwambo Tinga Wuod Jaramogi,
his face still owns the calm defiance,
his rest too noble, too tender, to be called death.

O Maker of dawn, the hand that stirs the tide of Nam Lolwe,
can You not breathe once more into this still chest?
Can You not summon him as You do the sun at morning?
For some men are forged, not born,
tempered in the furnace of struggle and faith,
Raila was such a one, flame and storm in human form,
a god who walked barefoot among the dust of his people,
teaching them courage by the weight of his silence.

No, gods do not die, they turn into wind,
into whispers that rise when nations kneel.
Jakom sleeps now, but even his sleep commands,
for peace follows him like a loyal song.
And today at Nyayo, love overflowed like a river breaking its banks,

Jowi! Jowi! Jowi!
The lion sleeps,
but his roar has become our prayer.

@doddyokelo

Agwambo Tinga

Jowi! Jowi! Jowi!
Wuod Adonija,
Wuod Nyar Alego,
Son of the wind and will.
You were born in a time when voices were whispers,
and men feared their own tongues.
But you spoke, and the air changed.
You called out freedom by name,
and it answered, even from behind prison bars.

They locked you up for believing too much,
for seeing what others were afraid to imagine.
But dreams don’t serve time,
they grow wings.
You walked out of those cells carrying a country on your shoulders,
tired, scarred, but still sure of tomorrow.
And that is how Legends Begin.

You fought for a Kenya that listened to itself.
For a people who could finally speak in their mother tongues
without asking permission.
You taught us that democracy isn’t ink on a paper,
it’s breath-taken, held, then shared again.
You bled through the cracks of history
so that others could walk without bleeding.

Devolution, they call it policy now.
But we remember it was once your prayer,
your stubborn insistence that every village should matter.
Counties rose from that conviction like sunrise over the lake,
and yet, those who eat from your harvest
pretend they do not know the farmer.
Kenya, ever forgetful,
quick to mock its midwives once the child is born.

They said you shook hands with your enemy,
and they spat the word betrayal.
But peace is never popular, it is necessary.
You taught us that victory isn’t always in winning,
sometimes it’s in choosing not to destroy.
You swallowed pride to save a nation,
and still they called you weak.
But the wise know, restraint is a louder strength than revenge.

You stood in Parliament like a storm,
your words cutting through hypocrisy like glass in sunlight.
You were feared, adored, misunderstood,
and sometimes, all at once.
You turned politics into something alive,
something dangerous, something holy.
Even those who called you stubborn
secretly wished for your courage.

They say you loved power,
and maybe you did,
the way a surgeon loves his scalpel:
not for the cut, but for the healing it can bring.
You weren’t chasing a seat,
you were chasing justice across decades.
And when power refused to listen,
you spoke to the people instead.

Five elections, five heartbreaks.
Yet you never stopped showing up.
You smiled through rigged dawns and broken nights,
still believing in a country
that sometimes forgot how to believe in itself.
You didn’t lose, Jakom,
you only taught us how to endure disappointment with dignity.

They’ve called you names, hero, traitor, messiah, menace.
But your story has never fit into one sentence.
You are Kenya’s contradiction,
the man both loved and feared,
praised and punished,
remembered and erased,
yet always present in the nation’s breath.

And now, as history exhales your name,
we see what you’ve always been,
the mirror this country avoids,
the conscience it still needs.
You lived, you fought, you forgave.
You gave us more than leadership,
you gave us language for courage.

Jowi! Jowi! Jowi!
Wuod Nyar Alego.
The man who kept walking,
even when the road kept ending.

@doddyokelo

Let it Rain, Brother

Hey, broken man,
you don’t have to hold the sky tonight.
Let it fall. Let it rain through your chest.
Strength is not silence, it’s the courage to shatter
and still call yourself whole.
The world taught you to be iron,
but even iron rusts when it holds too much sorrow.
So cry, let your saltwater baptize the pain,
let softness be your rebellion.

You are not weak for weeping,
you are simply human enough to heal.
Tears don’t strip your masculinity, they cleanse it.
Let them fall, and when they do,
may they wash away every lie that said you shouldn’t feel.
Even lions cry, brother,
we just never stay long enough
to hear them mourn.

@doddyokelo

Love, Receipted

You call me lazy,
as if rest were rebellion,
as if the absence of a paycheck meant
I’d married idleness and sworn fidelity to failure.
You think I wake each morning to romance poverty,
to sip on the bitter tea of rejection
and call it breakfast.

You think I don’t hunt for work,
darling, I’ve applied so hard the internet knows my name.
I’ve learned new skills until my mind wheezes from exhaustion,
repackaged my dreams in “professional tone,”
and written cover letters that could melt granite.
Still, the silence from employers breathes louder
than any sermon on hard work.

But go on, roll your eyes like coins in a rich man’s pocket.
You love the performance of pity, don’t you?
The way you sigh,
You wear my struggle like a badge
that says “look what I tolerate.”
You hold my empty wallet against my neck
like a priest offering salvation through mockery.

Your friends, the walking bank accounts,
toast to success with imported laughter.
They look at me the way one studies
a museum exhibit labeled Before Success.
And you,
you shrink beside them,
embarrassed to be seen loving someone
who doesn’t come with receipts.

I know I can’t afford dinner dates,
but baby, I can give you poetry,
written with hunger’s ink,
where every word costs a piece of my pride.
You want steak, I offer metaphors,
you want champagne, I bring conversation.
But apparently, love without a tip is just noise.

You say I make excuses,
as if failure were a choice I make before breakfast.
Man, I’ve tried,
tried until my hope broke its spine
from bending too long under your expectations.
But effort doesn’t trend, does it?
It’s not sexy on Instagram.

You used to look at me like promise,
now you look at me like pity dressed for dinner.
Your eyes audit my worth
like a cashier scanning expired dreams.
You don’t even say it out loud,
but your silence spells liability.
Love, it seems, needs a payslip now.

So go ahead, call me disgusting,
a broke ass night certified by circumstance.
Laugh with your friends,
they’ve earned their arrogance.
I’ll be here, broke but breathing,
scribbling poems on the back of rejection letters,
because even in poverty, darling,
I write better than they ever will live.

@doddyokelo