It’s what I didn’t say and now words hang
just like plastic bags in an Autumn tree,
veils from missing brides; I know it is wrong
for words to be left between you and me,
as year after year I watched time escape,
I have said it: I didn’t say enough.
Like Hardy writing thirty years too late,
scribbling in the dark and cutting-up rough.
Tell me can poetry re-make the past?
Does it have that transforming quality?
Do you have a ready answer to that?
And what can and does it achieve for me?
I can’t balance the books: its loss that costs.
It’s what I didn’t say, I know, that shocks.

Tom Kelly

Quote taken from ‘By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept’ a novel of prose poetry written by the Canadian author Elizabeth Smart and published in 1945.