A Poet’s Place of Longing

Yinka Olatunbosun

Nkeiru Okeke’s Under the Grates is a poem of quiet yearning, where love becomes both a presence and an absence, a thing longed for yet intangible. Through delicate imagery and a measured rhythm, Okeke crafts a piece that moves fluidly between solitude and hope, between the starkness of waiting and the richness of inner expectation.

Okeke employs a restrained yet evocative style, reminiscent of Lucille Clifton’s economy of language and Claudia Rankine’s meditative lyricism. The poem does not overindulge in ornamentation, but rather allows space for silence, for the breath between words to carry meaning. Phrases such as “under the grates of leaking light” and “love is a thing she names in quiet, / a thing that does not come” set a mood of subdued anticipation. The enjambment mirrors the protagonist’s waiting—words stretch, as time does, toward an uncertain resolution.

The poem’s strength lies in its imagery: the “grates of leaking light” immediately sets a scene of urban melancholy, where hope flickers but does not quite solidify. The line “she holds it in her mouth like a song” is particularly striking—love here becomes something to be tasted, something fragile, something both internal and unspoken. This physicalization of longing intensifies the emotional weight of the poem, making the reader feel the ache of waiting as something tangible.

Yet, Under the Grates does not collapse under the weight of longing. The subtle invocation of patience (“she waits, heart pacing itself / against the hush of distance”) introduces resilience. It is not a poem of helplessness but of endurance, a quiet but insistent belief that love, though elusive, still exists.

One can sense echoes of Clifton’s sparseness and Rankine’s meditative introspection in Okeke’s work. The absence of punctuation in places, the breath-like rhythm, and the way the poem does not force closure all point toward a contemporary lyricism that refuses neat conclusions. This is poetry that leans into uncertainty, that trusts the reader to sit in the unresolved space between desire and fulfillment.

Under the Grates is a poem of hushed intensity, a meditation on waiting and the delicate weight of longing. Nkeiru Okeke writes with restraint, allowing the unsaid to be as powerful as what is spoken. In this, the poem does not demand but invites—invites the reader to dwell in its pauses, to listen for love in the spaces between words, to recognize the power of persistence in a world that often forgets to wait.