Written piece
THE NAME HE KEPT
Solomon Joseph Umoh
Nigeria
About this piece
A poetic meditation on death, memory, and how names resist erasure as the living confront loss and silence. A son mourns his father, tracing a fragile thread between memory and loss, challenging the common linguistic thread of stripping the dead of their names and identity.
NAME HE KEPT
Because you were always by my side,
your passing into silence did not erase your name.
Illness waged its quiet war in your veins
and led us into an unplanned farewell.
Stanza 2
I saw you—still, stiff as stone;
I knew it was nothing, yet it was you alone.
It was you I bore from the morgue’s silence
to lie beneath a gravestone of tearful verses.
I refuse communion with corpses:
a mummy to others, to me,
still a man I could not unlearn.
Stanza 3
Yesterday, at your new home in the graveyard,
I groaned at your leaving and remembered
memories beneath the rustle of dying leaves.
You hovered in the restless wind—
not an apparition - yet you.
Stanza 4
Why did they choose, dear father,
to rename you once you were gone?
As though death could erase the name you kept.
The world is swift at wiping out traces,
stripping even death of its small dignities.
Stanza 5
I fear what becomes of names
when they return to silence.
Who will call you by the name you kept?