Good words hastily snapped with awkward claw
[You who never arrived]
When I read this, I feel like it is the kind of poem written to the self trapped inside, celebrating and mourning in the same breath. It’s that feeling of searching for and almost finding that freedom and potential buried beneath the years of being punished into smallness. Instead of running into the garden to play and search, we learned early on to sit still in our parents’ house, chained by permission to do no more than wonder out the window. There are moments, small but brilliant, where you can imagine or pretend that that person slips into your skin like a glove. You think, in that crest, that you are who you never got the chance to be; that your reflection and theirs have melted together (or that they were always one and the same). However, upon blinking, you see only yourself again. Or rather— you see what you are not. Perhaps that’s just the way it goes and all we can do is accept it and grieve who we never got to become without blame or shame. Having arrived at the same place myself, I wonder how the poet would have continued this story. What comes after pining and grief? All that’s left is to write the next verse about who you actually are.
