Death

By: Philip Muoghalu

Death, where is thy sting?

People say you have to experience love
before you can understand heartbreak.
But what if heartbreak begins
before love has learnt your name?

What if the deepest wound is losing someone
before you ever knew what it meant to have them?

I was barely three months old
when the cold hands of death found you.
Before I knew the warmth of your embrace,
I had already become acquainted with absence.

You became a story before a memory,
a photograph before a presence.

I have spent years inheriting you
through pictures and borrowed stories,
through the silence that follows your name,
through questions nobody can answer.

I wonder what your hands would have felt like,
what protection would have sounded like,
what it would have meant to call you Father.

This is death’s cruelest mathematics:
you became the missing number
in an equation I was too young to understand.

I keep adding the years,
searching for answers
to a life that never got to happen.

I did not lose a lifetime with you.
I lost the possibility of one.

No childhood memories to revisit.
No old arguments to laugh about.
No familiar voice stored in my mind.

While others mourn what they remember,
I mourn what I was never given.

Birthdays you never attended.
Questions I never got to ask.
Lessons you never got to teach.

A thousand unwritten moments
erased before they became real.

That is why
some absences never become ordinary.

Years pass. Children grow.
Life builds new rooms around the wound.

But somewhere inside me,
a child still stands at the doorway
of a memory that never opened.

I am still mourning you, Father,
not because I remember losing you,
but because I never got the chance
to know what having you meant.

ABOUT THE POET

Philip Muoghalu is a Nigerian poet and writer whose love for words began at an early age. From childhood, he found solace and inspiration in literature, developing a deep appreciation for storytelling, poetry and creative expression. Drawing inspiration from faith, personal experience, human emotions and everyday life. He uses poetry as a medium to connect, inspire and encourage others. Through his work, he seeks to remind readers of the beauty found in life`s journey and the strength that comes from faith and perseverance.