Secret Thanks
We never speak our deepest gratitude because it cannot be spoken.
Instead, as you sit around the table amid the chatter & the candles &
the sweet potatoes that exhale their aroma the way fog rises from a
slumbering pond, there will be a time of thanksgiving when you will write, on the hidden walls of your heart, in the space between the scars, secret letters.
And no one will know that you are giving thanks:
to the teacher that winked at you in the third grade signaling from her powerful throne that you were magic;…
to the person who brushed the back of your hair with his anxious hand sending waves of life through your heart;
to the child whose birth gave you life and to your mother;
to the friend who sat silent with you as you wept your way back to courage;
to the cloud that swept back the hem of her skirt last Tuesday morning to reveal the sun;
to the oak leaf that laid patiently on the ground waiting for you to see her dorsal fin before she swam away on the wind;
to the patient who soft-eyed her thanks right before you never saw her
again.
to the grandfather you never met as he smiles at you from the curtain near the six-paned window;
to your heart, even as she throws a slender shadow across your gratitude and you mourn the absence of those not there.
We never speak our deepest gratitude because it cannot be spoken. But we can send secret notes to our Thanksgiving ghosts.
-Erie Chapman
—
*The first painting is Thanksgiving, 1960 from the Joseph Roitner Gallery.
The second painting is Excalibur, by Curtis Verdun.
Journal of Sacred Work 
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