Friday, November 16, 2007

Speak again

Let me remember you,
Let me see you in my mind,
Let me accept
That you are gone.
I know that we shall not speak again,
Yet I know there was still
So much left unsaid.

Even if I was given
Another chance to speak
I would not know
What to say
What to do.

How can I ever explain
That even when
I think about you now
There are still no words
That can fully explain
The impact you had
Upon my life.

Even though there are things left
To speak upon
There is now nothing left
That I can say,
That I can do.

How do I explain
That even though I knew
That you would soon be gone,
I did not seek
To find the words
That I could speak
Before you were gone.

Yet now that you are no longer here
I find it hard to say the words:
That would mean I have accepted
What has come to pass;
That I have embraced the reality
That you are gone
And that we shall never
Speak again.


Creative Commons License
Speak again by Allison Brown is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Australia License. Based on a work at allisonbrown.blogspot.com.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's a lovely elegiac poem, but not one I can read often - it's that little bit too effective at capturing the sense of regret at leaving things unsaid, the mixture of hope and denial that makes us want to believe there'll still be time later to say them, and the fear that given the same situation again, we'd still feel just as paralysed and powerless as we were the first time. It's like a lot of your poems for me - it speaks directly to the feelings, making it hard to critique it in terms of technique or structure.
That said... the way you've structured it (verses and lines) works well for conveying the impression of someone working hesitantly through a loss, speaking half to someone no longer there and half to themselves, while trying to comprehend quite how things came to this point. The arrangement of the verses makes perfect sense, showing the speaker working through what they're feeling. Was the arrangement of the lines deliberate? I'm assuming so, because they give a sense of someone groping their way towards understanding I don't think they'd have had if they were structured differently, or if they weren't broken up the way they are.
(More pedantically, I'd also suggest swapping the second colon in the last verse for a semi-colon.)

Anonymous said...

I luv this poem sis.
It seems to be exactly wot i have wrote bout Dad.
I understand how much u miss him.
Not a day goes by that i don't wish he was here by myside.
Life seems so much harder with out him.
I struggle to live without him.
Luv u always n foreva
No matter where u r
Carly
xoxoxox