By Waheedah Kosefobamu

There is a man I know who wears sacrifice like skin,
So naturally, you’d miss it, so quiet from within,
He never made a show of all the things he gave,
He simply gave them, steady, strong, and brave.

I’ve watched him carry weight I didn’t know was there,
Rearranging his own comfort just to make ours fair,
He never said it’s nothing, because nothing is a lie,
He just made sure we had it, never asking us why.

I sent my broken phone home with a quiet kind of shame,
I didn’t want to be a burden, didn’t want to add to his name,
I told myself I’d manage, I’d find another way,
But two days later it came back, fixed, no word of delay.

No lecture. No complaint. No “do you know what this costs?”
Just a father who saw his child and refused to let her be lost,
And in that small and quiet act, I felt the whole thing clear,
This is what love looks like when it refuses to disappear.

He has done a thousand things I cannot start to name,
Each one wrapped in the same cloth, each one saying the same,
That we are worth it, always, that we never have to fear,
That home is not a building, home is him being near.

Some fathers speak their love in words that fill the room,
Mine speaks his in actions, in the lifting of the gloom,
In the yes before you finish, in the done before you ask,
In the way he makes the heavy feel like such a simple task.

I don’t know how he does it, how he keeps on giving still,
When life has asked so much of him and asked against his will,
But he rises every morning and he shows up every day,
Not because it’s easy, but because we are his reason to stay.

So this is for the man who fixed my phone in two days flat,
Who doesn’t know how much I felt, who doesn’t know all that,
Who thinks he’s just a father doing what a father does,
But to me, he is the greatest thing this life of mine ever was.

I love you, Baba. More than any poem could ever hold.
You are the kind of man they’ll write about when legends are told.