To Many Things I Meant to Say

I meant to say

the wind doesn’t sing the same these days

not since daddy died and left

I meant to say

I still glance out to the field come sundown

looking

for that huge buck

Meant to tell Mama

I saw her crying behind the smokehouse once

She blamed the onions

I didn’t ask

A boy learns early how sorrow hides in chores

I meant to say

I don’t like the stillness

Not the kind with crickets and whippoorwills

but the hush inside a man

when he’s got nobody left to carry his stories

I never said

I loved Mrs. Thomas

Not like a boy loves a schoolteacher

but the way a child clings to kindness

a steady hand

that lifts your chin and says

"Look at me when you speak child, the world is listening"

I meant to say

I write because I never learned to pray with my mouth

Only with my hands

scratching lines across paper like plowing fallow ground

hoping something might rise

from all the silence I buried

I meant to say

sometimes I feel like a shadow

dressed in a man’s flannel shirt

Folks see the checkered pattern

not the holler echoing underneath

I never told my granny

how quietly time passed,

like the gentle change of seasons,

like the fading light

out in the garden,

before I learned the words

to say thank you.

I meant to say

love is a hillside that needs tending

and I’ve let too much grow wild inside me

But I’m saying it now

But in the only voice that’s ever been mine

the one that walks barefoot

through these trails of memory

trying to hold

what I never quite had the courage

to write