Ebony came to me the way some dreams do—uninvited, vivid, and impossible to explain in the light. This poem grew out of the uneasy morning after, when a name I didn’t recognize sat between us like proof of something I never did. Writing it was my way of tracing that distance and offering the truth that sometimes the mind wanders while the heart stays home.
Ebony
Ebony…
a name I never knew, yet spoke
like a crack in quiet air—
a word that didn’t belong to me,
but carried weight like truth.
You stood there asking,
eyes searching mine for something real,
while I held nothing but confusion,
hands empty of the answer
you needed me to give.
How do I explain a ghost of a thought,
a name born out of nowhere,
stitched from sleep and silence,
mistaken for memory?
I have loved you in waking,
in every breath that counts,
yet in dreaming I betrayed nothing—
only stumbled through shadows
my mind could not name.
Ebony fades as quickly
as she came—
no face, no past, no place to stand.
Only the echo remains,
and the fear it left behind.
So hear me now, not from sleep,
but from the part of me that stays:
there is no hidden heart,
no secret I’ve kept from you—
only a dream that spoke too loudly
and a love still trying to be understood.
AUTHOR’S NOTE — Sometimes a name arrives in a dream with no history attached, a sound that feels truer than it has any right to be. Ebony is that kind of visitor, and the real ache lives not in her shadow, but in the quiet terror that the person I love will mistake that stray dream for a secret I never meant to keep.
— Author’s Note: Dreams have a way of putting strange words in our mouths, letting a name slip out that feels like betrayal even when it comes from nowhere at all. Ebony is that accident of the sleeping mind, a harmless ghost that still manages to shake the room. This poem sits inside that tremor, where love has to make room for the things we cannot trace or explain, and still choose to stay.
