So, there is an interesting story about this poem. I thought I would share it before posting the actual poem itself.
During the first week of the semester, one assignment for my writing class was for each student to write their "writing credo"—what we believed about writing, what we wanted to gain from the class, how we planned to go about it. Two or three students mentioned in their credos that one of their semester goals was to learn to become more "honest" writers. In response to that, my writing teacher suggested that one way to become a more honest writer was to write on this prompt:
Write the thing you cannot write.I thought that was an interesting idea. For the next several days, I pondered it, and decided that I was pretty sure there that prompt wouldn't work for me. After all, I write about everything: health, life and death, marriage, sometimes (to the chagrin of at least one reader of this blog) even my menstrual cycle.
The next week in class my teacher closed the hour by reading a
poem from the summer edition of
Poetry magazine. One line in the poem hit me like an anvil, and suddenly I knew
exactly what the "thing I cannot write" was. I managed to make it across the street to the semi-privacy of the gardens before letting loose my tears, and there I wrote this poem.
For several weeks I debated whether or not I should share it with my class on a workshop day. I wasn't sure I was okay with this particular poem being workshopped. I wasn't sure I could even read the poem out loud without crying in front of my entire class. A few weeks ago I uploaded it to our class forum, so that if I got brave enough at some point I would have the option of pulling it up and workshopping it.
I was pretty sure that day would never come.
Last Wednesday was a day I had signed up to workshop one of my poems in class. Since I obviously wasn't able to make it to class that day, I figured they would just skip me and pick someone else. To my surprise, that evening I got an email from one of my classmates with notes from that day's workshop . . . of one of my poems. To my even greater surprise, out of the three poems I had posted in the last few weeks to the online forum, they picked—you guessed it—the one I had never intended anyone in my class to actually see.
Since everyone in my writing class has now read and reviewed this poem, I thought I might as well post it on here, as well.
The Thing I Cannot Write21 September 2009
I dreamed
this morning. A straw
between my teeth, I fought
for breath. I woke,
and it was true.
The pain was real, lodged
there where throat met chest.
This, then, is the thing
I cannot write. Some
questions, I am not
brave enough
to ask. Someday
when my child throws
her mortar board high
into the air, will I
be there? When she comes
hand sparkling in the sun, will I
be there to hold it?
All the time people tell me,
“your husband
is a courageous man.”
It's true: I only wish
they did not have
to say it.
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