Notes About The Poem
This poem is a heartfelt tribute to my father, capturing both the strength he carried through his silent battles and the deep emptiness he left behind. Through the simple objects that remain are his chair, his lighter, the things that still remember him, I try to hold on to his presence and the courage he lived by. It is a poem of love, grief, and the hope that even in the darkness of loss, the small sparks he left within me will someday grow into light.
The Chair He Left
The Chair He Left
(An Elegy for My Father)
.
He was the quiet axle
In a world that spun too fast.
A carer, courier, warrior
not of blood, but of burden,
bearing pain like a sealed letter
he never let us read.
His body betrayed him,
bones buckled under cancer’s slow siege,
but he stood as though nothing trembled.
He smiled through dying days,
saying, “I’m fine,”
and we fools, in the grace of his lie, believed him.
He gave like a river pouring through parched lands,
never thought of his thirst
but cracked his own banks.
He left behind a sandal by the door,
a stick still leaning like it waits for his reach,
a chair , just a chair
but it holds his silence
like an old coat still warm from the body.
His cigarette lighter lives in my pocket now.
I flick it, not for fire, but memory.
It sparks,
but will never burn like he did.
And I, I falter.
Too weary to gather the scattered,
too hollow to carry what he bore
with ease, like breath,
like second nature.
I sit in his chair,
but I am unwelcome.
It creaks with his absence.
I am not him.
Not the bright edge of his wisdom,
not the spine of his spirit,
not the tether that held us
when the world came undone.
He was more than any memory can carry,
a lighthouse built from flesh and will,
beaming love through storms he never named.
And now the light is gone.
And I, I’m learning to walk in the dark
without his hand on my shoulder.
But the path he carved
with quiet courage
is still beneath my feet.
Maybe I’ll follow,
maybe I’ll fall.
But I carry his lighter.
And sometimes,
that is enough to start a flame.
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