Poetry month

[serene]

I am going to use poetry month to get caught up on my poetry-gift challenges. First, one I wrote for gramina for the swap. Her five words were rest, sorrow, love, terror, and grass.



Magnolias

He said he would be back
That time when all the magnolias had just dropped their blossoms
As though they'd taken off their dresses
Which now lay in heaps around them in the grass
The air was thick with the scent of them
Almost sticky

His acid-washed jeans hung low on his hips as he loaded his things
He hitched them up with a fierce tug I felt in my throat
His blue-gray eyes avoided mine as they never had
My mother sobbed in the corner of the porch

I couldn't speak
Even when he pulled me to him and the smell of
Tobacco and sweat and loss and love
Made me squeeze my eyes so tightly shut
I saw pinpoints of light for minutes afterward

The magnolia petals turned from pale pink to rust brown
As the calendar counted my sorrows, calling them days

But nights were the worst
I didn't rest, too busy waiting for him
Longing fought with terror when I managed an inch of sleep
My brain thought up ways in which the hot desert and the unknown enemy
Would kill him, would tear him like construction paper, would melt him away

When I get to this point in the story, everyone wants to know
If he came back

That is not the question
I wish they would ask

Comments

[firecat]

I love the images
an inch of sleep
would tear him like construction paper

And I feel this way about so many questions:
That is not the question
I wish they would ask

[serene]

Thank you -- you picked out my two favorite phrases in the poem.

[hel]

...What question does the poem's narrator wish people would ask?

[serene]

It could be anything, but the point of not answering the "did he come back" question is to focus on the child's own experience -- the pain of the dad's leaving and being gone (and in danger), the strain the mother's anguish must have put on them, etc. -- rather than to get resolution by knowing whether he returned or was killed in battle or whatever.

(Things I imagine the preferred question could be (though I didn't have a specific question in mind while writing): "Why do we send people to war anyway?" "How did your family cope?" "Are you all right?" "Why didn't your mother comfort you?", etc.)

In an earlier poem, I talk about how everyone wanted to know if I knew my rapist/attacker. I have always thought that was such a dumb question, as if that would say something meaningful about that experience, or help the person asking to understand me better or something? Just wrong question. Not that the right one is some specific other question -- just that one is so wrong. (In the poem, it's expressed as "As if someone knowing someone could excuse or explain why he left her blood on the floor of the 7-Eleven.")

[hel]

Logical. :)