After You Poem by ashok jadhav

The house still breathes your name in quiet ways—
a creak of stairs, a door that will not sleep.
Your cup waits where your hand once left its warmth,
a small belief that you might yet return.
I speak to you in pauses of the day,
in questions no one else could ever hold.
The air receives them gently, gives them back
as silence shaped like you.
Grief arrives without a sound or shape;
it settles in the chest, a patient weight.
I carry it from morning into night,
learning the slow grammar of your loss.
What aches the most is not the day you left,
but all the days that learned to follow on—
each one a door I open without you,
each one a prayer that ends before amen.