Simply Hope

The sky pulls a charcoal blanket over its shoulders,
heavy and weeping.
From a great height, the rain descends,
turning the world into a place of hiding,
a place where we fold ourselves small
behind locked doors,
wishing to vanish with the light.

But the atmosphere is restless.
A sudden fracture of silver splits the grey,
and the silence is startled
by the loud, golden arrival of the sun.

It isn’t just light,
it is a prism breaking across the horizon,
the earth looking up and finally smiling back.
The air feels new,
charged with that sudden, sharp pain of romance,
the kind that arrives when you realized
you survived the storm.

We learn then,
watching the shadows dissolve into nothing,
that darkness is a poor tenant.
It has no permanent address here.
The light is the only thing
that knows its way home.

@doddyokelo

A Simple Faith

It begins as a fracture in the monolith of night,
not a flood, but a thin, insistent silver
widening the door.

We call it belief,
but it functions more like a spine,
the invisible architecture that holds us upright
when the gravity of the world
tries to pull us into the dust.

To trust the Unseen is to plant a garden
in the middle of a drought,
knowing the rain is already traveling
toward you from a horizon you cannot yet see.

It is the alchemy of the soul,
turning a desperate plea into a rooted hallelujah,
folding the abyss of a thousand whys
into the quietude of a single yes.

When the world loses its voice to the thunder,
faith provides the dialect of peace.
It is the power to stand amidst the ruins
and speak of the rising song yet to be built.

@doddyokelo

Mama

The world is wide and filled with borrowed things,
With pale stars losing heart and roads that end,
But you are the original, the source,
The porch light in the dark I first learned to love.
I find you in the breath between the chimes,
The tether of your hand upon the spinning world,
Turning the tremor of the crowd to song,
And making sense of all I cannot say.

Your name, Aleq
sounds like water over stone,
An ancient music in the blood.
You taught me that a heart is not a cage,
But a wide window looking toward the sun,
You gave me wings so I could learn to fly,
And held the string so I would not get lost
Among the stars or in the trackless forests.

To love a mother is to know the truth,
That grace is not a gift we ever earn,
But a long shadow cast by someone’s soul.
I stand within that light and find my way,
Carrying your strength like a hidden coin,
Wealthy in the ways that truly matter.
You are the anchor in the shifting tide,
The only compass I will ever need.

@doddyokelo

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

Just the Two of Us

I want to wake while the world is still gray
and see the sun start its fire in your eyes,
to watch the morning climb your throat
and spill across the bed like spilled honey,
sticky and warm and ours.
I want to witness the exact moment
the light claims you,
making a map of every curve I know by heart.

But the day is just the waiting room for the dark.
I want the hours when the house grows quiet,
when we peel back the noise of the street
and the heavy expectations of being men and women.
I want to slide into the night with you,
rib to rib, a slow collision of heat
until my pulse finds the measured thrum of yours
and stays there.

I want the salt of your skin against my tongue,
the scent of woodsmoke and wild things
clinging to the places where we touch.
I want to be so tangled in your limbs
that the blankets feel like a burden,
nothing between us but the fever
of two people trying to beat back the cold.

Let the world break itself outside the door.
In here, there is only the press of your weight,
the velvet friction of breath on breath,
and the long, slow sinking into sleep
where my skin forgets itself
and simply becomes a part of yours.

@doddyokelo

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

Home, At Last

I have waited on the trembling edge of distance,
breathing weeks and swallowing whole years,
until the heavy harvest of my wanting
ripened like a fruit too heavy not to fall.

And when the hour comes,
when your hands, sure as riverstones, find the fold of my waist,
I will know I am home.

We will not rush.
Love will come slow, with a dignity earned,
with the lull of thunder gathering before it speaks.
Your heartbeat will answer mine
in a language I never had to learn,
for it lives inside the marrow
of who I am.

Then, quiet as morning,
a circle of silver will claim its place,
cool and certain,
like a moon descending into my palm.
I will stand taller beneath its gleam,
knowing I am chosen,
and choosing in return.

We will walk the shoreline,
where the wind bows its head
and the sea offers its salt as blessing.
Our shadows, two once searching,
now one wide image,
will stretch across the world’s rim,
writing scripture in wet sand
that even the tide dare not erase.

For this is no faint drifting,
not the whim of waves or the vanity of chance.
This is gravity, baby,
a pull deep as the ocean floor,
a call older than the stars,
strong enough to shake bells inside my bones
and make them ring just for you.

And when morning breaks,
I will look into your eyes
and find sunrise waiting there.
I will hear my name on your tongue,
spoken like a promise.
I will know, finally know,
that forever was never far,
it lived in me
the moment I learned
to love you true.

@doddyokelo