Untold Stories

From Pinterest

Lost in the sea of story and song,

I am drifting.

Collecting words like an old bottle,

Full of the messages of a lifetime.

And laughter tastes salty on my lips.

Oh, these waves of untold glory, unspoken pain,

Passing through naught but the glint of his eye,

Or the tap of her toe on the shoreline,

 

They overwhelm me.

 

I sit on my hands to keep them from twitching,

Itching to weave the tale of the metal-encased man

 

—boy—

 

Whose body struggled on, even when his mind had died,

‘Til his last breath escaped him unawares.

Or the story that the builder tells, offhanded-like, as if it doesn’t bear him up,

As if it didn’t mold him, etch lines into his face,

Etch years into his heart.

That a boy of life went to war,

And came back a man of loss.

Or the song that the little girl will never sing,

Of lost and found,

 

Lost and found,

 

Lost and found again.

The words rush in an incomprehensive lump,

The wild sound of the sea caught in a shell.

The stories loop and intertwine, meld and twist,

Contort in my head like the image of the sky from underneath the many waters,

Until the words break apart and reform into one word,

Just one.

 

Grace.