Ten short lines, no full stops, and a one-word title: «Dad». Sophi k's poem gives us a speaker waiting for a father who does not arrive. The gravel and the sun suggest they are outdoors, though the poem never says where or why. Its central idea is the stubbornness of love. After a night of hoping and hurting, the speaker's last words are a reassurance, not an accusation.
The poem begins with the body rather than with feelings. "Feet tremble, gravel claws in" gives the ground an animal hostility, as if the world itself is gripping the speaker. Then comes "Cheek soaked to the bone in salt," a twist on the familiar phrase "soaked to the bone," which usually belongs to rain. Here the liquid is salt, so tears are never named. We see only what they leave behind, and the idiom suggests the crying has been total. Notice how few "I"s there are. For the first lines the speaker is reduced to feet and cheek, a person broken into sensations.
Then "All alone," the shortest line, sits by itself, and the layout makes the loneliness visible. The heat that "fills my pores" feels like weather getting inside the body, while "Hope in my heart with every noise" suggests a mind on constant alert. Any sound might be the father, so each one lifts the speaker and then lets them down. What the speaker hopes for is oddly modest: "To apologise, to bring me home." The apology comes before the homecoming, which hints, judging by the order, that being acknowledged matters as much as being sheltered. This is also the first moment the poem speaks to "you," so the title turns from a label into someone being addressed.
The poem has no regular rhyme scheme, but it plays with near-echoes. "Alone" and "home" share a long vowel and a closing hum, and "home" looks like "come" on the page, so the eye expects a rhyme the ear never quite gets. That near-miss mirrors the reunion the speaker imagines. The repeated word "come" also changes shape: "you've come" is a wish, but "The time never comes" is a blunt, flat statement with no cushioning. The line is short and in the present tense, and it reads like a verdict.
After that, the body takes over again. "Stomach rolls, begs" is personification, and it is the stomach that begs, not the speaker, as though pride or dignity keeps the person quiet while the body pleads. The poem doesn't say whether this is hunger or nausea, and both fit. The longest line follows: "as the sun greets me once again." "Greets" sounds friendly, but the sunrise only proves that another stretch of time has passed without the father. "Once again" suggests this may not be the first morning, though that is an inference, not a fact the poem states.
Then the language drops into plain speech: "It's okay, I still love you dad." There is no metaphor here, just a contraction and a spoken rhythm, as though the speaker has stopped writing and started talking. "Okay" is the least believable word in the poem, because everything before it has shown that nothing is okay. The word that matters most is "still," which admits that something has tested this love and that it has survived. The line also finishes without a full stop, which leaves the waiting open, and it ends on the word that was the title, so the poem loops back to where it began.
The poem tells us nothing about what the father did, and that restraint is part of its strength. The reader has to feel the situation through gravel, salt, heat and hunger, and through the gap between what the body says and what the speaker insists. Its significance lies in how it holds anger back and lets forgiveness arrive before an apology does. That makes the final line both tender and painful, since the reassurance is offered to someone who may never hear it.