Silence is built into the title of Meeka's poem. "Tacenda" is Latin for things that should be passed over without being spoken, and the final stanza admits the dilemma outright: "all this is better left unsaid." Yet the whole poem is the saying of it. The pull between what a child feels she must keep quiet and what she can no longer hold in drives every line.
The speaker, a young person close to adulthood, addresses a parent whose behaviour has reversed the usual roles. The opening request is almost polite: "Could you please be a bit more mature." The complaints that follow are heavy. The speaker is expected to be "my rock" but is the one giving "all the comfort," calming the parent "down at night" and fighting "your every fear and insecurity." The parent also tells others about "the tragedy of your daughter" in search of sympathy, then brings "neverending toxicity" home. The poem never explains what that tragedy is. We see it only through the speaker's weary eyes, as a bid for pity rather than a wound, and that gap tells us how tired she is.
The form carries this strain. Most lines pair up in rhymed couplets (rock/block, life/strife, adult/insult), and the chiming has a sing-song, almost nursery-rhyme quality. Set against such grown-up material, the sound feels like a child trying to keep order over a situation that is out of order. The rhythm is deliberately uneven. Look at "Yet I'm the one who gives you all the comfort I'm the one who has to calm you down at night." There is no punctuation where a pause should be, so two accusations run together in one breath, as if stopping would let the speaker lose her nerve. The third stanza is only two lines long, and its rhyme, "sympathy" with "toxicity," is loose and slightly clumsy, as if the speaker cuts herself short. The clinical word "toxicity" also stands out among the plain, homely vocabulary around it, a diagnosis a young person might pick up elsewhere and use as her own.
Repetition does much of the work. "Adult" returns again and again, first as an accusation ("For an adult, about who you are you're quite unsure"), then as a plain statement of fact ("I'm the child and you're the adult"). "Calm" appears twice, and the swap in meaning is the point: in the second stanza the speaker calms the parent, and in the fourth she asks, "Shouldn't you be the one keeping me calm?" The opening phrase "Could you please" comes back at the start of the fifth stanza, now sharpened by "just once in your life." The image of adulthood "right around the block" is modest and domestic, a street corner rather than a cliff, and that makes the need sharper. She is about to walk out into independence and wants something solid behind her first.
The ending is the most interesting part. The speaker softens, acknowledging that the parent's past "was filled with hardships and strife," and apologises in advance for the words: "I really don't mean to insult." The double dots in "I still love you.. but" show her stumbling mid-sentence, love and grievance colliding. She imagines the poem being read and hopes the parent will understand. Then comes the last line: "even after all this I'd still hold your hand." It is a gesture of love, but it is also one more act of caretaking, the very role she has been protesting. The poem does not resolve this irony. It lets the love and the burden sit together.
That honesty is what makes the poem worth reading. It gives voice to a quiet, common-feeling situation, a young person carrying a parent's emotions, without turning the parent into a villain. Its roughness, from the uneven lines to the missing pauses, works in its favour, because it sounds like feeling put into words before it has been tidied up. The title advises silence, but the poem chooses to speak, and it does so tenderly.