Before Your Name Poem by Martins Akhoeneto

You thought I'd choke when you withdrew your air;
I breathed before your footsteps found me there.

You were a season passing through my years;
My pulse was mine before you named my fears.

You wore your wealth like winter on a pane,
And priced your kindness like a borrowed rain.

You raised your name above my little sky,
As though your shadow taught the sun to rise.

Yet roots keep maps beneath the tongue of earth;
The buried seed still knows its way to birth.

I learned to breathe where sorrow thinned the air,
And taught my lungs to live beyond despair.

What you took left rooms no hand could see;
I gathered back the scattered parts of me.

I do not curse the silence of that door;
It taught my feet to seek that road no more.

Now morning lays its fingers on the blind;
I do not search the light for what's behind.

I breathe. The room is still. The light moves on.
And, for the first time, I don't know you're gone.