nerves of steel by jen staggs

Comment

Comment by David Stafford on March 31, 2011 at 6:29pm

But this poem is about addressing your parents. It's about preventing them from getting together and thus making your own life null and void. What's good for them makes you go poof in the ether. Selfless vs self-less....

Sad or no, I just love the simplicity of its lament and the imagery of course.

Comment by amazon59 on March 31, 2011 at 6:06pm

ok - I don't take this as sad - reflective. all the things we coulda shoulda done. Perhaps I am too reflective. But what would you tell your youthful "untouched" self? Personally, I would say that I wish I had lived much wilder, much more crooked, much more outside the lines. Perhaps i have for others, but for myself - oh I would have tattoos and black leather and been more exotic. so what if they all fall when you are 80. But, like the apocolyptic scenes, the past holds all the failures and the success. If we could only touch them a little, a slight nudge what would have been?

Comment by Jen Staggs on March 31, 2011 at 2:56pm

That is the saddest poem ever.

Comment by David Stafford on March 31, 2011 at 1:55pm

It's puts me in mind of this wonderful poem by Sharon Olds

 

I Go Back to May 1937

by Sharon Olds

 

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,

I see my father strolling out

under the ochre sandstone arch, the   

red tiles glinting like bent

plates of blood behind his head, I

see my mother with a few light books at her hip

standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks,

the wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its

sword-tips aglow in the May air,

they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,   

they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are   

innocent, they would never hurt anybody.   

I want to go up to them and say Stop,   

don’t do it—she’s the wrong woman,   

he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things

you cannot imagine you would ever do,   

you are going to do bad things to children,

you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of,

you are going to want to die. I want to go

up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,

her hungry pretty face turning to me,   

her pitiful beautiful untouched body,

his arrogant handsome face turning to me,   

his pitiful beautiful untouched body,   

but I don’t do it. I want to live. I   

take them up like the male and female   

paper dolls and bang them together   

at the hips, like chips of flint, as if to   

strike sparks from them, I say

Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.