In a sudden flurry of autumn wind
the whirling leaves fell, spiralling,
scattering on frosty ground.
Look! said the seven-year-old,
poring over their indented shapes:
They are tiny violins.
Back story:
When I was seven I wrote my first poem. It was:
The violin leaves blow round and round,
The violin leaves scatter the ground.
(Everyone back then was starting each line of a poem with a capital letter.)
I was far too young to have any intellectual concept of metaphor. My Dad, who did, was very excited when I explained ‘violin leaves’ – but because I had to explain, I thought that most people wouldn’t understand my poem, so I changed the wording to ‘autumn leaves’.
Then – at a time when the Western world at large still had little idea of micropoetry – I thought it was a bit short and inconclusive. (Probably the word ‘inconclusive’ wasn’t yet in my vocabulary, but I had the sense of it.) So I added two more lines, did a bit of rearranging, and wound up with
The autumn leaves
Whirl round and round,
The autumn leaves
Scatter the ground.
Then Jack Frost comes out
And throws snow all about.
Yes – the revision lost all originality! Not to mention that we didn’t get snow on the ground in the town where I lived, only up on the surrounding mountains – though we did get frost. People still thought it was very clever for a seven-year-old. And so it remained until this day – my sweet, cute, childish, very first poem.
Then Magaly, at Poets and Storytellers United, invited us to 'take a poem or story we wrote many years ago (preferably, one that wasn't exactly awesome), and rewrite it'.
OMG, looking through old, failed pieces in my ‘Drafts for Reworking’ folder was demoralising! I deleted a few, put others back into the ‘Too Hard Now But Maybe Some Day’ basket … and eventually remembered this poem. Could I turn it into something more adult, to appeal to other adults?
At first I thought of a haiku. Having recorded the experience – in my very first poem, moreover – I could vividly recapture the scene in memory. I would have to lose the rhyme, and of course the metaphor, neither of which belongs in a haiku. And it’s true that ‘violin leaves’ is not obvious enough to be understood without explanation – leaves come in many different shapes. It would be good to put that idea back in the poem, though. But even similes are rare in haiku.
So I decided to try a tanka, which allows for more options. Many drafts later, some of them very pretty, the violin shape was still difficult to clarify without resorting to prose! (It might help if I knew what kind of tree the leaves came from, but that detail has been lost, and Google didn't find me anything that fits the image I recall. My quick outline sketch comes closer.)
My eventual solution, as you see above, was to acknowledge what is actually true now; instead of trying to recreate the experience, to step back, place it in the past, and describe it from this vantage-point, looking on (or in!) at the little girl I used to be.
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To see what others have shared, see Poets and Storytellers United's Friday Writings #25.
