I Should Have Seen More Of The World Poem by Shalom Freedman

I should have seen more of the world
It has so many things -
I should have touched the details down to the slightest difference
And made each perception – meaningful
I should have had a kind of mind different from my own
Less general and abstract and more able to make sensations real-
I should have spoken of what touches the earth and the actual lives
Of so many kinds of different people -
But I did not -

I sang my poem in my own small way about my own endless self
And thought and made my poems of thought
And I too writing this
Remembering how I always vowed to never repeat my father
And live in regret
Try to not say, ' Should and could and would have been’.

There are other things and other people and other worlds and much I cannot do and be -
Let me sing my own song
Others have what they have
And I what I am
And this poem too
Another meditation
Which tries to have a music of its own
And somehow broken and half real stumbles upon the page.