If I recall correctly, I’ve written only three poems in my life, and each one of them has a story worth telling.
The first poem
I was in fifth grade, and we studied rhyme in our Romanian class. The homework was to write a rhyming poem of our own. I remember staring at the lined notebook on my desk at home and thinking I could never do that. Then I just started writing, and I didn’t stop until I was done.
I brought the poem to school the next day and read it in class. It was about a forest elf who invites a group of schoolchildren to watch a concert he’s been preparing in his oak meadow. The concert features a mountain ballad about a king and a beautiful fairy. The kids who were invited to watch it end up loving it.
The kids in my class loved it too. In fact, the teacher was so impressed that she asked me to write it up on an A4 page, and then she displayed it on something called the Honor Gazette, which was mounted on the hallway wall for everyone to see.
You’d think that was a great encouragement for me to keep going. Ha, nope. Because I knew I could never pull that off again, I didn’t try to write another poem for many years.
Story time detour
Speaking of not-touching-that-again, the same thing happened when some friends tried to teach me a dice game many years ago. We were just going through the basic rules of the game when I rolled a round. I looked at where the dice landed, and the first thing I saw was a 1. That didn’t seem good, so my eye darted to the next die for something more substantial. It was another 1. I didn’t think doubles mattered much—at least not small-number doubles—so I looked for another die. It was a 1. And the next, and the next, and the next.
My friends were not happy. They had played that game for years and never rolled six 1s themselves. Apparently, six 1s was a big deal in whatever game they were trying to teach me. They took the dice away, and I never learned how to play that game.
The third poem
I wrote it when my father died. I wrote it as a poem because my thoughts were too fractured to fit into well-formed sentences. The images in my mind belonged together but in a broken way, like shards of a plate that shattered on the floor. When I was done writing it, it seemed like it had captured how I felt. But it wasn’t beautiful or meaningful or poignant. It was just terrifying. Still is.
The second poem
Somewhere between the first and the third, I wrote another poem. I was trying to capture the awe and terror I feel when contemplating history, and I couldn’t put it into a paragraph or an essay. Because it’s about my all-consuming fascination with history, I thought I should share it with you. It’s not too long, I promise.
At the edge of the ocean, I think I’m safe as I watch death shimmering before me.
The ocean is not death; it’s life, the primordial soup of life.
But it would be my death, a few dozen meters out in the open waters.
I can’t swim for long, not even when the brine keeps me afloat.
The sun would parch my lips, my eyelids, my eyeballs,
my tongue would swell, my throat would close,
I’d be extinguished in a day, even if
none of those flesh-eating things—sharks, eels, jellyfish—happened to me.
At the edge of history, I think I’m safe as I watch death shimmering before me.
History is not death; it’s life, the whole of life, from the primordial soup on.
But it would’ve been my death, a few dozen decades in the past.
I wouldn’t have been alive for long, not even if my mother had been a rich woman.
Childhood diseases, a broken tooth, a burst appendix,
a cut with a rusty nail, the bite of a rabid mouse,
I’d have been extinguished sooner or later, even if
none of those flesh-killing things—a man with a gun, childbirth, a fire—happened to me.
Ocean and history, both deadly beautiful nouns.
Water and iron, the most common things in the universe.
Out of them, the rest of life was forged on Earth,
the rules of the game established.
In the beginning, there lived my ancestors,
small beings with dark eyes and clenched jaws,
who crawled on the shores and dwelled in caves,
who dug up the earth, threw in the seeds, and lay down in their graves.
Each one of them a winner, who passed on precious genes.
Their legs marched in formation to wars.
Their arms carried rocks from the quarry.
Their hands felled trees and built bridges.
Their ears listened to the words of the prophets.
Their voices echoed the stories.
They were fighters.
I’m not a fighter.
I would’ve been drowned in Round One.
Instead, I’m alive today
and I write their stories.
Talking Classics
Of course, if you want a more sophisticated exploration of someone’s fascination with history, I recommend Mary Beard’s recent book Talking Classics: The Shock of the Old. It took me a while (up to around page 40) to grasp how she feels about ancient history, the field she has devoted her entire life to.
But then it finally clicked, and I was just nodding my head: that! The book is also worth reading for the sections where she describes how modern culture keeps misreading or reshaping the ancient world. She looks at how hard it is to get close to the ancient world as it really was. That’s why her lifelong desire to literally touch and feel that past seems very familiar to me.
I’ve only written three, but I like reading poems. It’s just that I don’t find enough time to reach for those poetry books more often. But I do love the direct line to emotion and moment that a poem offers. It’s so different from writing narrative, of course, though the emotion and the moment can shine in a novel or a short story too. We just need to earn them through the careful scaffolding of plot and character.
