January: I trace the edges of your absence,
a brittle photograph yellowed with regret.
The headstone reads nothing but your name,
your voice trapped in the cracks of the old walls
I hear it howl through the winter wind—

February: The earth becomes a hymn of forgetting.
I kneel in the frost, palms pressed to the cold ground,
searching for your shadow in the cracks of frozen soil.
The moon wavers, a lantern too dim to guide you back,
and I am left alone with unanswered prayers.

March: I cannot find you in the smell of rain,
in the fading lines of your face stitched into my dreams.
The scent of cedar in your hands is a ghost that lingers,
a phantom, in the hollows of my chest.

April: The world tilts, a woman and her childless hands
turn to the sky. I recall how your laugh held the sun,
how the shadow of your voice could still the storm.
Now, the winds carry only dust and whispers,
the hollow echoes of all the things left unsaid.

May: You come knocking in my sleep,
your hands stained with the colors of dusk.
I open the door to find a hymn on your lips,
a dirge for all the Fathers who left too soon.
I light a candle and let it burn until the wax becomes silence.

June: The inscription on the gravestone shifts—
not just a name, but a wound left open.
It reads: The passing of a Father, a loved Father.
grief — and the communion
of a child still reaching for your hand.

July: Some nights, I dream of doors.
Behind them, you are waiting,
but when I step through, there is only air,
and I am left to build altars from the rubble
of everything you never got to say.

August: The passing of a Father is the breaking of a world,
a hymn sung backward, a communion of the forsaken.
I walk knee-deep in ash, a memory trapped between twilight and smoke.
kneeling before the grave of a man who still haunts my breath.
Grief is the breath I cannot release
and I am left with the communion of silence.

September: I search for you in the brittle hymn
of dying leaves, in the pale bouquets
left at the altar of your life. But you are not among the dead;
you are somewhere else, folded into the dust,
the wilderness that refuses to become stone.

October: The wind carries your name, a whisper
scattering across barren fields.
The world unravels its prayers, soft and bitter,
a woman cries for her father, her sons:
Eke, Orie, Afọ and Nkwọ,
weeping with her shadow. Every elegy is a bird trapped in the wind,
every memory is a spark trying to bloom.

November: You come to me in dreams,
knocking with the weight of your sorrow.
Your face is a hymn I cannot sing, your eyes a wake of crows.
I know what it means to be unmade by grief,
to light incense from the embers of scars, to shape loss into ritual.
Here, at your grave, the amber-lit tide pulls me under—
I offer my soul as a psalm and a broken liturgy.

December.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Olha Vilkha on Unsplash