August, without a doubt, is my least favorite month. It’s when the garden starts to pant and parch, spiders build massive obstacle courses in the yard, fruit goes from unripe green to fuzzy grey within minutes, and wildfire smoke descends to choke our skies, our lungs, our eyes.
And this August, it’s also when a “great” idea for a bit of topical poetry falls totally flat.
We all know that—say it with me—”every first draft is crap,” but sometimes it stays crappy. Sometimes there’s just no polishing that thing up. Sometimes you’ve just missed the mark, either because you picked the wrong form for the piece, approached it from the wrong angle, or (as in this case) the basic idea just wasn’t strong enough to hold what you wanted to put in it.
Yes, yes, I know, you can always edit, and that’s true, you can, but there are limits. No matter how much we all want that poem, that short story, that scene, that chapter, to deliver a heavy punch of emotional power, no matter how much we edit edit edit until our fingers bleed red ink, there are some pieces that just won’t—that just can’t—do the job we need them to do.
And so it was with this week’s poem.
My intention was to write a poem about immigration and the desperation that would drive a mother to send her child, alone, on a long and dangerous journey to a distant land. I wanted to create an image of a mother bidding her son farewell, and I wanted the reader to be able to see it as depicting the modern-day people who are suffering in Guatemala. It had to be vague enough on specifics, though, so that it wasn’t definitively set in today’s Latin America because, at the end I wanted to flip it and show that the mother and son were not from 21st century Central America, but from County Cork, Ireland, in the 1860s, fleeing the famine and violence of that era.
The (I hope, obvious) point is to draw a parallel and show that through American history, white folks like me were also immigrants fleeing poverty and political strife (mine were from Tuscany in the 1890s). Alas, after many many rewrites, it just didn’t feel like it was working. The piece felt lifeless, banal, and flat.
So, in an effort to rejuvenate it, I turned (one by one) to my beta readers.
First Reader keyed off certain words I’d used (like “quay”) and thought it was set in France and, absent any historical clues, figured it was post WWI.
Edit edit edit.
My second reader keyed off another phrase, and figured it was maybe set in the same historical period.
Edit edit edit.
Finally, the third reader I asked for feedback tumbled on the fact that it might be set in Latin America, but then, what’s with all the Irish stuff at the end?
At that point I decided it was time to call it. This one was DOA. Totally unresurrectable.
Failures are lessons. There are many here, some of which I’m still figuring out, but the main lesson I have learned is this: not everything is salvageable.
I did have fun toying with blank verse, which I eventually dropped in favor of simple iambic meter, which in itself was a challenge.
So, not a total loss.
Onward.
k
Farewell, My Heart, She said
She checked again (the dozenth time) inside his coat, the stitched and hand-embroidered tag with Uncle’s name and New York street. She smoothed his hair, so dark and sleek, so like his father’s was before the gangster knifed him for the bit of food he had, his shoes and belt, then left him dead on the cathedral steps.
Ten other boys stood patiently—all friends and cousins—waiting to depart this heart of misery, a caravan of youth to take their parents’ dreams to new and distant homes.
“You boys,” she said, “You older boys, you watch the young ones, eh? They’re not as strong as you.” They nodded; they were good boys all, but this was not a place for boys like them. The hunger. Gangs. The slums and daily violence of poverty and death. No work. No food. No future but of hate-filled streets and short, despairing lives.
The journey would be dangerous, she knew, and Uncle said, once they arrived, they would be hated, cursed, despised just for the land that birthed them. Oh, but better that than hell, she told herself. Yes, better that than here.
Her ringless hands, her empty home, her everything had gone to buy a single hope, a single life, a single opportunity to reach a place where hope still breathed, and so, again, she kissed her boy, his dark and shining hair, and checked the label one more time:
To Kevin Sean O’Shea, at Number 321 Mulberry Street, New York, New York.
Farewell, my heart, she said. Farewell. I’ll see you in my dreams.
At least you’re writing about this issue! I’m more than dismayed at the heartlessness of so many people I thought were decent, caring people . . . their inability to put themselves in another’s shoes.
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Yes, indeed. The callousness of so many toward those who are in the same situation as their own great-grandparents (give or take a generation) has been an education for me. And in so many, it seems to be an unconscious bias, which totally disheartens me. The more I hear the phrase “This is not who we are,” the more I think “I’m afraid it is.” However, it’s not who I _want_ us to be; I want us to be so much better than we are as a nation. Thanks for stopping by, Kay.
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I couldn’t Agree with your sentiment more.
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OK, here’s my idea. Do stanzas with clear references to different cultures, going back and forth, with parallel or contrasting experiences on the immigration journey.
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