The Poem That Took Eleven Drafts and One Storm
Ten neat versions failed; the eleventh was written by candlelight, afraid.
Draft seven had a rhyme scheme. That is how lost I was.
The poem was supposed to be about my mother, who died two Marches ago, and who I could not write about for a year and a half no matter how many mornings I sat down in front of the same blinking cursor with the same cold coffee. Then one afternoon I opened a page of prompts and one line undid me: write about a sound you can still hear. I knew the sound before I finished reading the sentence.
My mother singing during thunderstorms.
She sang badly. This matters. She sang "Que Sera, Sera" a half step flat, in our narrow kitchen with the windows rattling in their frames, and she sang it during every storm of my childhood, stirring a pot that did not need stirring. To seven-year-old me, this was the sound of absolute safety. Storms meant singing. Singing meant nothing in the world could touch us.
So I started the poem. Here is the honest catalogue of what happened next.
Draft one was written in a single sitting and read like a eulogy delivered by an employee. The word "angel" appeared twice. My mother once chased a scooter thief down our street in her house slippers. She was not an angel. She was a woman with excellent aim.
Draft three turned the whole thing into an extended weather metaphor. Grief as a low pressure system. Memory as humidity. It was clever. It was also completely dead, a poem wearing a lab coat, describing my mother from a safe professional distance.
Draft five went to my workshop group. They said polished. They said controlled. One man, who I otherwise like, said accomplished, which I have since decided is the worst thing you can say about a poem, the way calling a marriage "functional" is the worst thing you can say about a marriage.
Draft seven, as confessed, rhymed. I do not know what came over me. I think I hoped the rhymes would carry the feeling the way a stretcher carries a patient, so I would not have to touch it myself.
Draft nine was minimalist. Twelve lines, enormous margins, the white space "doing the work." The white space was doing no work. The white space was where the truth was supposed to go, and I had left it blank on purpose.
Draft ten was neat, publishable, and a lie. I read it at an open mic and people clapped and I stood there feeling like I had introduced them to a stranger wearing my mother's cardigan.
Around that time I read an essay on why safe poems lose, and I hated it, because it was about me. The argument was simple and rude: if a poem costs the writer nothing, it pays the reader nothing. I closed the tab... I reopened it twice that week, the way you check a bruise.
Then October came, and with it the storm.
It arrived on a Tuesday night with a named-storm arrogance, and at twenty to ten the power went out across the whole street at once, that soft thump of silence when the fridge stops.
I live alone. I found one emergency candle in the kitchen drawer, a stub the length of my thumb, and a lighter that took nine tries. My phone was at six percent, and I decided to save it in case the sycamore outside made any decisions.
I sat at the kitchen table with the candle and nothing to do. No screens, no music, no fridge hum. Just wind taking the back fence apart slat by slat, and a flash somewhere near the substation that turned the clouds briefly green.
And I was frightened... Properly frightened, adult frightened, which is worse than the child kind because you know the emergency numbers and you know they are busy.
At some point, without deciding to, I started humming... Half step flat.
I heard myself do it. That is the only way I can describe the moment: I was inside the sound and outside it at once, a grown man humming "Que Sera, Sera" alone in the dark, and I understood, at the speed of a slap, that I was not comforting anyone. There was no one to comfort. I was humming because I was terrified and the tune gave my breathing somewhere to stand.
Which meant.
Which meant she was terrified too. All those storms, all those kitchens. A woman alone with two children after my father's shifts went to nights, singing flat over a pot that did not need stirring, because the stirring gave her hands a rhythm and the song gave her fear a fence. I had spent ten drafts building her a lighthouse. Serene, permanent, sweeping the dark for my benefit.
The lighthouse was the lie.
She was not above the storm. She was in it, with us, singing.
A safe poem is a door you paint beautifully and never open.
I wrote the eleventh draft right there, longhand, on the back of a takeaway menu, in the light of a candle stub, in about twenty minutes. My handwriting slants across the page like it is leaning away from wind. The poem let her be afraid. That was the entire revision. Ten drafts of technique, and the fix was permission.
It did not mention lighthouses. It mentioned the pot, the slippers by the door, the half step flat, the way she would sing slightly louder on the thunder as if outbidding it. It said, in the last lines, what I had never once let any draft say: that she was scared, that she sang anyway, and that this is the only kind of brave I have ever actually witnessed up close.
The power came back at one in the morning. The lights were shocking, rude, like someone flinging open curtains in a hospital. I read the menu-poem once under the kitchen bulb, afraid it would evaporate the way candlelit things do. It did not. It was the first draft of the eleven that could survive electricity.
In the morning I typed it up and changed one comma. Then, before the polishing instinct could wake up and start its little engine, I sent it to a monthly poetry contest, because I knew that if it stayed on my desk another week, draft twelve would appear, and draft twelve would be wearing the lab coat again.
It was commended, not crowned. I am telling you this because the essays never do. The judge's note said one line in it "sounds like a kitchen," and I printed that email, which is not something a controlled, accomplished person does.
The real result came later, when I read it to my brother over the phone. He was quiet for a long time... long enough that I checked the call had not dropped. Then he said, "You can hear the stove." Then he said, "I thought I was the only one who knew she was faking it."
We had never once said this to each other in four decades. A poem said it in thirty lines. I finally understood what people mean when they say they wrote about the memory instead of around it. Around it took me ten drafts and eighteen months. About it took one storm and twenty minutes.
Here is what I keep from all this, and I mean keep literally: the candle stub lives in my desk drawer, unlit, next to the folded takeaway menu. Drafts one through ten were written under a good lamp, at a reasonable hour, by a man in full control of himself, and there is not one true sentence in them.
Now, when a poem of mine goes neat and dead on the table, I take the stub out and stand it on the desk. I do not even light it. I just need the reminder of what it took: the dark, the wind, the fear, the flat little song.
Some poems cannot be written by a person who feels safe. You can wait for the storm, or you can stop pretending you were ever out of one.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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