Lament For What Remains Poem by ashok jadhav

I wake each day to rooms that still remember you.
Your absence hums like wires behind the walls,
a sound too soft to hear, too loud to silence.
Morning light reaches for your empty chair
and finds only dust, patiently waiting.
I speak your name in thoughts I never finish.
The words fall short, like letters never sent,
folded and worn from being held too long.
I search the day for echoes of your voice—
in passing laughter, in a stranger's tone—
but nothing answers back.
Grief is not a storm that breaks and ends;
it is the weather of my breathing now.
It comes in gentle rains and sudden cold,
in moments when the world forgets to ache.
I learn its weight the way one learns a limp:
slowly, unwillingly, until it stays.
At night, I gather memories like embers,
cupping them against the dark, afraid
they too might fade if left unattended.
What hurts the most is not that you are gone,
but that I must keep living where you were—
carrying love with nowhere left to go.