What She Left Behind

The break wasn’t a sound, not really.
It was more the way a fence post gives way
after years of leaning into the wet wind,
a slow, settled surrender to the earth’s heavy pull that no one bothers to watch.

She left the gate swinging wide,
and I suppose that’s where the dust got in.
It’s the hollow of a fire gone out,
stark as a white stone in a dry sky,
unyielding as the granite we used to stack
to keep the field from the garden.

I went out today to check the timber.
The young trees are still bent from last year’s storm,
white ribs bowing over the black dirt,
refusing to stand straight even now that the air is still.
They’ve learned the shape of the weight they carried.

I thought of calling out to the woods,
but the woods are busy being trees.
And the heart, I’ve found, is much like a dry field,
it doesn’t actually shatter.
It just hardens until the plow can’t find a way in,
waiting for a rain that hasn’t promised to come.

There is a certain duty in the repair,
in picking up the stones she let fall.
But for now, I’ll just watch the sky turn the color of wet slate
and wonder if the deer know the difference
between a path and a boundary.

@doddyokelo

After

It didn’t fall so much as it unfolded.
One minute, the sky was a familiar ceiling,
and the next, a bruise began to spread from the center out,
smothering the sun until the light felt thin,
brittle enough to snap between my fingers.

You don’t realize how much the light holds you up
until it’s gone.

Now, the air is thick with the soot of burned-out stars.
The iron draft of a closing door has changed everything,
it’s a predatory thing.
It’s in my bones now, pulling my shoulders toward the dirt,
turning my footsteps into heavy prayers that no one hears.
My knees have forgotten the habit of standing.

There is a cold, dense knot where my chest used to be,
a collapsed star, a private black hole
feeding on the scraps of my better days.
It doesn’t just take, it erases.
It has swallowed the before, the maybe, and the us,
leaving only this heavy, crippled silence
where my heart used to beat.

@doddyokelo

Still Home

Your touch was magical, a sudden and quiet healing
that reached through the skin to the very bone of me.
It was a gentle conjuring, a way of saying yes to the light
until my eyes danced with a glee I had long forgotten,
shining like smooth stones at the bottom of a clear, bright river.

Your look was intense, a steady fire that did not burn
but saw through the masks I wore for the world.
And oh, your talk, it was a pure water, a holy sound
that pulled me in like a song you’ve known since birth.
There was no struggle in the falling, I simply leaned
into the grace of you and found myself finally home.

But now the rooms are wide and the air is thin and still,
and I am singing the melody of a name I miss too much.
I am holding a place for you, built out of my own heart,
waiting for your footsteps to wake up the morning once more.
Come back to the warmth you started, come back soon,
for the joy in me is waiting for your hand to lead it out.

@doddyokelo

Let Me In

Your mind is a cathedral of locked doors,
where I walk the perimeter, tracing the cold stone,
listening for the silver resonance of a breath that sounds like my name.
I am an expert in the art of the unspoken,
gathering the crumbs of your glances like a hungry bird,
content to wait in the shadow of your mystery
until the daylight finally learns how to break through.

Expose the map of your pulse, the hidden place
where your armor thins and the genuine heart beats.
I do not ask for a tour, I ask for the keys to the foundation,
to be the protagonist in the story you tell yourself at midnight.
Let me inhabit the space of your firsts,
as the very oxygen that fills your lungs
before the world taught you how to hesitate.

I can feel your love like a subterranean river,
heavy and gold, moving where the marrow dreams of light.
But I am drowning in the shallows of your caution,
wondering if you will ever let that river break the banks.
I love you with the violence of a sun that never sets,
I am waiting to see if you will finally surrender to the same
beautiful, terrifying gravity that holds me to you.

@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

He Spends the Gold of Her

She is beautiful, yes,
but beauty grows fangs in the dark.
She tells you she’s out with a friend,
yet her truth is curled on another man’s chest,
his heartbeat pounding, the thud of wanting,
a sound you were never allowed to hear.

His fingers roam through her hair,
slow, sure,
mapping a tenderness she once withheld.
She loves it,
the salt of his sweat,
the wild brush of his chest hair,
the animal warmth that keeps her there.

She is not busy, brother.
She is not home.
She is answering a call
you were never invited to,
the quiet work of sheets and bodies
moving without guilt.

Her phone isn’t dead,
your name is.
Blocked.
So silent you can hear your own hope collapsing.

The things she hoarded from you,
laughter, softness, time,
fall easily into his open hands.
She gives him the light she swore she never had.

Rise from the wreckage,
rebuild the kingdom of yourself.
Leave her ghost behind
and grow into your better name.

There is life beyond this wound.
And love, real love,
will meet you where you stand,
yours to keep.

@doddyokelo

Let Me Go

I’ve been watching the clock face more than yours lately,
Checking the signal on a glass screen that stays dark.
You say you’re busy, and I suppose that’s a kind of truth,
But busyness is often just a wall we build
Stone by heavy stone, to keep the neighbors out.
I’m standing on the far side of that wall now,
Listening for a footfall that never seems to come.

It’s the silence that does the hardest labor,
It sows a crop of doubts in the fields I thought were cleared.
When you don’t answer, or you answer three days late,
The words feel like an afterthought, a cold crumb
Thrown to a bird that’s forgotten how to fly away.

If the fire has gone to ash, don’t stir the coals.
There’s no use in pretending the room is still warm
Just because we’re both still standing in the dark.
Go on and say it. Unlatch the gate and let me go.
A clean break is like a sharp frost in late autumn,
It kills the garden, yes, but it saves us the long misery
Of watching the leaves turn yellow and rot upon the vine.

@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

Man Enough to Cry

I know, I’m a man, yes, the great pillar of might and muscle,
The one who never trembles, never falters, never feels.
Society’s favorite statue, polished, silent, hollow.
But save that sermon, really, keep your “men don’t cry” gospel.
I am human, not granite shaped for your comfort, I bleed too, I just hide it better.

Oh, how noble it must look, dying quietly inside,
Smiling wide with a cracked soul, calling it strength.
You call it “African masculinity,” I call it emotional suicide.
I can’t drink your bravery forever, it burns going down.
Sometimes I just want to exhale without the label “weak,” without the world mistaking honesty for failure.

Let me speak, even if my words leak salt and sorrow.
Don’t hand me depression and call it dignity.
If tears offend your tradition, good, let them flood it.
I’d rather drown honest than live pretending I’m steel.
After all, even lions cry, you just don’t stay long enough to hear it roar in pain.

@doddyokelo