After Atticus,
Poets spend their lives trying to find a better way to say
he loved a girl.
I am here, trying to write you into being,
to hold you within the careful lines of a paper heart.
All the poets before me trained my hand,
shaping every word, every pause,
so I might write the poem
that was always meant for you.
I have written your name across the margins of notebooks,
built small temples of language to mirror your beauty,
shaped sentences with care,
hoping they might do you justice.
Yet you remain, always just beyond reach.
You are not simply a collection of words.
You are the breath between them,
the pause where meaning gathers,
the quiet that allows language to become music.
I have searched for metaphors worthy of you.
Each time I reached for a line, it slipped away,
like light through open fingers.
For years I carried unfinished verses,
waiting for them to settle into meaning,
believing one day they would lead me
towards something real.
There were moments when you felt like a poem made flesh,
breathing life into words I had never learned,
meanings I had never known how to hold.
You are not merely a poem, you are the poem,
the one every poet longs to write,
and quietly accepts
can never be completed.
You are the poem that refuses closure,
a line that continues beyond the page,
a single verse
that stills the breath.
Perhaps that is your truth.
Perhaps you were never meant to be finished,
never meant to be fully understood.
Perhaps you were meant to remain endless
to those who look.
You are the poem I was trying to write
long before I knew your name,
the shape of a thought waiting for language.
Writing this is an act of defiance.
After Khayyam's questions,
after Hafiz's devotion,
after Rumi's circling wisdom,
after Whitman's wide embrace of the world,
I write still, knowing it will never be enough
to hold a beauty that cannot be possessed,
only witnessed.
You are not the poem I once hoped to write.
You are the poem I will spend my life trying to reach.
And in that distance, there is a quiet grace.
You remind me that poetry
is not about capturing perfection,
but about having the courage to follow it.
