Nothing’s so hard to live with
as the words you never spoke.
If only one of you had said,
just once, Let’s not or Don’t.
Let us pray for the unspoken
and for the unspeaking
that lose their finger hold
and fall below the lip of days.
Let us pray for all things
chewed and swallowed up.
Let me take and care for he
whom I weigh like a coconut
in the palm of my hand;
an alien that neither knows
nor feels nor understands.