The Words That Stayed Poem by ashok jadhav

I kept them folded in my mouth too long—
the questions, the confessions, the small truths
that waited for a better hour to speak.
Now time has sealed that hour shut.
Your name still leans against my tongue,
heavy with sentences that never learned to walk.
I answer you in thought, mid-conversation,
then remember—there is no reply to meet me.
So many endings never found their way
to punctuation or farewell.
We left our meaning hanging in the air,
half-said, half-lived, forever incomplete.
Grief is not only missing who you were;
it is the weight of who we might have been.
I carry our unfinished language with me—
a dialogue the silence refuses to close.