They spoke for me when I could not explain why my chest hurt for no visible reason, why goodbyes stayed in my throat, why questions learned early to stay quiet. They lived entire lives inside what I could not say at dinner, in classrooms, in the rooms where adults used calm voices for things that were not calm. What we don't say does not vanish.
It waits. It waits in the body, in the way a child learns to read faces too quickly, in the way silence becomes a skill, in the way habit, in the habit of being agreeable when truth would take too long. The unsaid grows older with us.
What was once fear becomes patience. What was once grief becomes carefulness. Anger learns restraint, then learns language, then learns when to leave.
Poems became the place where these things were allowed to finish growing. A sentence could hold what a voice could not. The day I understood lost before anyone named it.
The years I carried questions without asking them. The moment joy arrived and I did not know how to let it stay. I did not write about these things when they were happening.
They needed time to become speakable. What we don't say ripens. It changes temperature.
It changes color. It stops asking to be rescued and asks instead to be told accurately. Even now, long after I have learned how to speak more freely, the poems still arrive first.
They carry what the voice sets down gently, not because it is weak, but because it has learned where truth survives longest. What we don't say is not silence. It is time working very carefully toward language.
Poem. Awesome. You see, this is what I mean, you know, that you just never know what can trigger off thought through a creative process.
