in the swelling of tides

the unread poem

an unread poem is unwritten poetry— ink still dreaming in the vein, a slow current beneath the skin where no light has yet entered. Pages breathe in the dark, their margins uncreased by any gaze, their fibres holding the faint salt of the tree’s first rain. They live in the quiet tide before the pen descends, in the pause between heartbeat and word, where silence folds itself into a listening shape. In the shadowscent of paper waiting to be touched by thought, you can almost hear the hush of unwoken syllables turning in their sleep. Some drift closer to the shore of speech, their edges foaming with consonants, then slip back into the mind’s undertow— a retreat as deliberate as arrival. Perfect in their unspilled form, they are a library of ghosts, each spine uncracked, each title a tidemark on the inner coast. And we, keepers of this unbroken harbour, carry them— the weight of what has not yet been said, the shimmer of what may never be— bound in the quiet tide that moves through us, and returns, and moves again. .