21/04/2026
// One Year On.
So many thoughts still crowd my head,
so many words left there instead,
half in silence, half in flame,
calling softly through your name.
Moments pass and nothing stays,
life burns bright, then shifts its ways,
and tomorrow is no promised thing,
no sealed reply, no certain ring.
We get this one life, brief and strange,
all heart and hope, all loss and change,
so hold it close while it is here,
speak the love, make it clear.
Because the ones we love do not just go,
not when they taught us how to grow,
not when their kindness still moves through
the things we say, the things we do.
They live in gestures, looks, and lines,
in stubborn strength, in warning signs,
in laughter rising unaware,
in all the ways they left us care.
And maybe grief is not just pain,
but love that has outlived the rain,
proof that something pure was there,
proof that someone mattered there.
It hurts like hell, and that is fine.
It means your soul still knows the tie.
That kind of bond does not undo.
It bends through time. It carries through.
The people we truly held so dear
would never ask us to stay here,
frozen in the moment loss came in,
circling the dark it settled in.
They’d want us living while we can,
to take this life with both our hands,
to go and see, to try, to be,
to do the things they could not reach.
And strange how after someone’s gone,
the hidden shapes keep carrying on,
the missing pieces, one by one,
catching light they never caught.
Stories surface. Truth appears.
Old wounds, old strength, old quiet fears.
The things they carried, held inside,
the storms they never named out loud.
And in those fragments, more is known,
not just the man, but how he’d grown,
how pain can shape a life in secret,
how love can still pour through the weakness.
So tell the stories. Say them plain.
Let memory walk through joy and pain.
What’s worth remembering should be shared.
What shaped a life should not be spared.
Loss is change, and change moves through
every feeling we thought we knew.
The motion under every scar,
the pull of who we really are.
And ice may thaw, and what remains
is not just water, not just pain,
but something left beneath the break,
a deeper truth the heart can take.
So if you love them, let them know.
Do not wait for some later road.
Do not trust time to always spare
the chance to say, I’m glad you’re there.
Because one day all that will remain
are names, and echoes, and the change,
and all the love we chose to give,
and all the ways we dared to live.
One year on, I still feel you.
In who I am. In what I do.
And though it breaks me, still I know
love does not end. It only grows.
---
My dad, John Andrew “Iceman” Rounce, passed away on 24 April last year. On that final day, we found ourselves talking about deep subjects, including mortality itself, before he went home and passed away. That last conversation has stayed with me in the year since, weighing on my mind in ways I am still learning to understand.
This poem is a gathering of those thoughts, written in the hope that they may speak to others who are facing grief, loss, and the painful but necessary act of moving forward. ♥️
