I keep a folder of unwritten poems. I do not call it that, because that is the kind of thing a person says at a reading and immediately regrets. But that is what it is.
Some of them sit there because they aren't ready. Some of them sit there because I am not ready, which is a different problem with the same paperwork.
There is one I have been not-writing for most of my life. It is about my mother. She left when I was three months old, and so the poem cannot be about a sheet on a clothesline coming briefly alive in the wind, the way a clean lyric poem about a mother is supposed to be. I do not have that sheet. I do not have that wind. What I have is the absence of weather. A distant shadow that occasionally crossed the lit part of the room and then, just as quickly, didn't.
I have only ever finished one poem about her. It is called Vengeful Mother, and it is not gentle. It is about a mother who would devour her young to keep her own happiness intact, as if a three-month-old could possibly be the thing standing in the way of anything. At three months I was not sabotage. I was hanging on to life. My world was not a battlefield I had any say in. It was a soft animal trying to keep breathing.
Silver Threads in Shadowed Skies
In the vast expanse where darkness sprawls, Threads weave through night’s shrouded veils. Each glimmer, a story of resilience calls, In the heart of storms, hope prevails.
Read it in Echoes From the Heart →That is the poem I have. The other poems — the ones that would tell a softer story, with a window open, a song on the radio, a hand in mine — those poems do not have the material to stand on. So they wait in the folder, and they will keep waiting, and I am at peace with that. Not every silence is something you owe a poem.
The poems I did not write are not failures. They are honesties I have not yet figured out how to tell without lying. Some of them I will write eventually. Some of them I will not. Both are allowed.
What I have learned is that the unwritten poem is its own kind of writing. It teaches you what you are not willing to fake. That, it turns out, is most of the craft.