Marda Messick

Lost Pages 

Pages you know exist but you can’t find them.
—William Stafford

The black ruled notebook
I packed for a journey,
the journal of my love and fear,
is missing from the suitcase pocket,
someplace misplaced,
disappeared.   

My inward words, found,
exposed, puzzled over,
deciphered elsewhere
by a stranger, my inner life
a splayed-open book,
held in unknown hands.

If I found your lost pages  
in a cafe, under a bed,
on a seat in a train
that just left the station, 
would you be ashamed,
of your human condition?

There’s incognito relief
in the unsigned confession,
in the letter unsent,
in love undeclared,
in not showing up,
in pretending to live.

Now I write each day on
a new blank page,
the flux of myself safe in a drawer,
seeds for the mill,
chaos and storm, the needful outpouring
before the poem.

What is hidden comes   
to the light, the inside revealed,
the secret disclosed,
one you can keep, one you can own:
like you, I’m afraid
and dying for love. 

Marda Messick is a poet and accidental theologian living in Tallahassee, FL on the ancestral territory of the Apalachee Nation. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Christian Century, Delmarva Review, Literary Mama, Speckled Trout Review, and Pandemics Journal.