The Poem I Wasn't Allowed to Read on Air
The station said too political; the silence said more.
Forty minutes before I was supposed to read my poem on the radio, the station manager asked to see me in a room that smelled of instant coffee and 1974. His name was Gerald, he had kind eyes and a tie the color of weak tea, and he was sweating in a way that told me he had already decided what he was about to say and hated it.
Harbour FM is not an empire. It's two rooms above a carpet shop, a transmitter that coughs in wet weather, and a morning show hosted by a woman named Pat who has been telling the same town its bin collection days for nineteen years. Every second Friday, Pat has a local poet on for three minutes. That fortnight, the poet was me.
The poem was about the shirt factory. If you're from a town like mine you already know the whole poem, whatever the words are. Four hundred jobs, a hundred years of steam and cotton, my grandmother's hands, my neighbor's pension, and a councilman who stood on a platform two autumns ago and promised, into a microphone, that the factory would close over his dead body.
The factory closed in March. He remains in excellent health.
The poem didn't even use his name. It didn't need to.
In a small town, a pronoun can be a guillotine.
Gerald turned his coffee mug in a slow circle and said, We can't do the factory one. It's too political. The station can't take sides. Then, hopefully, terribly... Have you got something about spring?
I want to tell you I stood up and quoted somebody brave... I didn't. I had thirty-nine minutes, a mother listening at home with the radio already on, and a coward's inventory of my own poems. So at 9:20 a.m., under the red ON AIR light, into a microphone wearing a little foam hat, I read the one about blackbirds.
It's a fine poem, the blackbird one. Competent. Seasonal. Neutral as a hotel painting. I heard my own voice come back through the headphones and did not recognize it: a person impersonating me, pleasantly, for three minutes. Pat said it was lovely. The weather came on. Somewhere in town, four hundred people got on with their unemployment.
In the corner of the studio sat the listener line, an actual rotary telephone, avocado green, older than me. Pat told me once it only ever rings for two reasons: wrong numbers, and death notices phoned in by the funeral home. It has never once rung for poetry, she said.
It rang while I was putting on my coat.
Pat answered, frowned, and held the receiver out to me with a look I still can't fully describe. For you, she said.
The voice on the line was old and unhurried, the kind of voice that has said everything it's going to say in life at its own chosen speed. Frank, he said. Forty-one years at the factory, cutting room. That was a nice poem, love. The birds. Then a pause with weight in it... But I heard you were going to read the other one.
I had read the factory poem exactly once in public, at the library, to eleven people and a radiator. Word, apparently, travels. In towns like mine, word is the one industry that never closes.
I started to explain about the station, about sides, about Gerald and his tie, and Frank listened the way a wall listens, and then he said the sentence I think about most weeks of my life: Well, I'm not the station. Read it to me now, then. Just me.
So I did.
Standing in my coat, in a radio studio, off air, I read the banned poem down a telephone line to one old man. The red light was dark. The foam microphone hung there, useless as a decoration. I could hear him breathing through the parts about the cutting room, and when I finished there was a long quiet... longer than politeness, and then Frank said: Aye. That's the one. And hung up, because his generation does not linger on telephones.
I drove home with my hands too tight on the wheel, understanding something for the first time. Gerald had been right, in his way. The station couldn't take sides. But the blackbird poem had taken a side too.
Neutral is a side. It's the side with the better furniture.
A censored poem does not go quiet. It goes everywhere the microphone is not.
That night I typed the factory poem out and posted it on a community wall for poets, full name attached, no explanation. What happened next did not involve me, which is the point of it. Someone printed it. Someone, and I have never found out who, laminated it, which in my town is the highest civic honor, and zip-tied it to the factory fence beside the padlocked gate. It stayed up through two storms. When the last of the machinery was auctioned in June, a woman I'd never met read it out loud at the gates to a small crowd in work coats, and somebody's phone filmed it, and my mother saw the clip before I did... and rang me in tears of a complicated kind.
A month later I found a line of it quoted in one of those profiles of writers nobody had heard yet, credited to me, describing the poem as the thing that had given a stranger permission to write about her own town's closed pit. Permission. From a poem a radio station wouldn't touch. The three minutes of air Gerald couldn't give me turned out to be the smallest room the poem was ever offered.
I don't hate Gerald. I want to be clear about that, because this isn't a story with a villain in a tie. He was protecting two rooms above a carpet shop, a license, Pat's nineteen years. Small stations survive on the goodwill of exactly the men my pronoun pointed at. He made his frightened arithmetic and I made mine, and the difference between us came down to a green telephone ringing at the right moment.
Because that's the other thing I learned, the thing I'd tell any writer holding a poem some voice has called too much: you do not need the whole town on air... You need one Frank on the line. Every poem that ever mattered was, at some point, read down a bad connection to an audience of one, and the audience said aye, that's the one, and hung up. Everything after that is just distribution. Even now, when I write anything with teeth, I read it aloud alone first and imagine the cutting room breathing on the other end, and it keeps me honest, and strangely hopeful, both at once.
The factory is being turned into flats. The councilman cut the ribbon on the scaffolding, smiling into a microphone that welcomed him.
Harbour FM still does its poetry slot, second Fridays. I've never been asked back.
But the avocado phone is still there, in the corner of the studio, under the dark red light. Pat says it still only rings for wrong numbers and the dead.
I know better. I hope it rings forever.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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