Poetry Forum

Interesting Definition of a Crime
 
A little girl with stage 4 cancer
cannot comprehend the pain,
all she knows is her daddy is there
and he takes her pain away;
her life returns and she feels joy again:
that is until her daddy is arrested
and taken away, for easing her pain.
 

 


Link to news story
 
 
–Erthona
 
 
©2015

Thank you for posting this. Things like this should be aired ...(My honest opinion those who have judged and taken such mindless and insensitive action in this case - need a slap upside the head).
Your poem manages to convey that message without being preachy or offering a judgement. Good on you.
Wordy and more prose than poetic, repitition of the word pain all could be chewed over... but this offering stands as it is for me and non the worse for it.
thanks for sharing

link doesn't work for me but I guess dad gave her hemp oil or such

very gripping poem

Dale,

Thanks for bringing this story to my attention and in that sense your poem has done it's job. It's simple almost childlike structure gives it even more poignancy when read with the knowledge of the story.

I'll just mention that your link didn't work when I tried it and then I noticed that in the address bar that it had an extra http at the end of it for some reason. But I managed to find your originally intended page for the link 
http://blog.sfgate.com/sfmoms/2015/01/20...ed-cancer/
I hope you don't mind that I've posted the link here in my post just so that people can have access to the story until you get back to fix it... As it is a very moving story that defies logic.
I thought it was very clever journalism the way they ended the piece by stating that the little girl was now on morphine.
Hopefully the public will kick up enough of a fuss that the powers that be act with common sense and the two can be reunited as soon as possible.
Thanks for posting this,

Mark

Mark, thanks for doing that. I have updated the link and checked to make sure it was operational this time

Sorry srijantje, yes it was "hemp oil" or the equivalent. It was medical grade cannabis oil.

Thanks AJ. Yes, this was never meant to be much of a poem, mainly just a way to inform about the story. It was a write once and post sort of thing, I never even realized about the repetition of the word "pain" until you pointed it out. As mark said, "Thanks for bringing this story to my attention and in that sense your poem has done it's job." That's all I could ask for.

Thanks again for giving it a read,

Dale

(01-21-2015, 05:44 AM)Erthona Wrote: [ -> ]Interesting Definition of a Crime
 
A little girl with stage 4 cancer
cannot comprehend the pain,
all she knows is her daddy is there
and he takes her pain away;
her life returns and she feels joy again:
that is until her daddy is arrested
and taken away, for easing her pain.
 

 


Link to news story
 
 
–Erthona
 
 
©2015

I've heard about this thing and found it preposterous. I think a crime is anything that breaks the law, which is just a set of outlined rules. I guess cases like this are the ones that end up changing the law sometimes. Though, law is a tricky field I don't know much about. I mean legalese seems to contain brackets in parenthesis and then parenthesis in the brackets.

"I mean legalese seems to contain brackets in parenthesis and then parenthesis in the brackets."

I prefer to think of it as lawyer-ease. They make it so difficult to understand that you have to hire a lawyer. Talk about cultivating your own profit base.

dale

Sighs...missed this and sorry I did. Everything seems to be really preposterous to me in the medical field the last couple of decades--don't give the child hemp oil (which has none of the high, just the pain relief)
but hey!
she should be on a opium derivative.

It makes me want to smack people. Or give them shakenbabysyndrome to wake them UP!
blehblehbleh bena goes mental once again.

achingly sentimental and condescending, to the point that I thought it was supposed to be funny. Then I realised it was straight faced, which made it even more funny

His little girl,
she went to bed,
smoked a joint,
and now she's dead
and now he's smoking
smack, instead.

Shembala,

There was once a comment made about someone's ex-girlfriend with which the ex-boyfriend disagreed. He in turn made a sentimental plea asking for the offending post to be removed because it would upset her and give her an unfavorable opinion about him. Why should the person who posted the the message in question not respond by saying, "Well people get upset, deal with it. I can't be held responsible for some other person's emotional overreaction; I'm above such sentimentality. I shall keep it posted. To do anything else would be to be untrue to myself and rationality. 

I will of course leave out the part where he became frantic when his post was not responded to immediately. Not to mention that he seemed on the verge of losing his mind. Of course I would assume you would condemn such exaggerated emotionalism and tell the fellow to go jump in the lake; that such sentimental appeals  do not move you. Right? Now that is what I call funny. I guess we just have different taste in humor! No foul no play.


Just a question. Which do you find funnier: a little girl dying of cancer in excruciating pain and being taken from her father, or some forty years old guy brutally raping a church going 13 years old girl making her feel so ashamed because she thinks that somehow she brought it on that she can no longer look her father in the face because she knows how much she will disgust him if he knew?

I'm sure I will find your answer amusing.    

Dale

(01-23-2015, 08:34 AM)Erthona Wrote: [ -> ]Shembala,

There was once a comment made about someone's ex-girlfriend with which the ex-boyfriend disagreed. He in turn made a sentimental plea asking for the offending post to be removed because it would upset her and give her an unfavorable opinion about him. Why should the person who posted the the message in question not respond by saying, "Well people get upset, deal with it. I can't be held responsible for some other person's emotional overreaction; I'm above such sentimentality. I shall keep it posted. To do anything else would be to be untrue to myself and rationality. 

I will of course leave out the part where he became frantic when his post was not responded to immediately. Not to mention that he seemed on the verge of losing his mind. Of course I would assume you would condemn such exaggerated emotionalism and tell the fellow to go jump in the lake; that such sentimental appeals  do not move you. Right? Now that is what I call funny. I guess we just have different taste in humor! No foul no play.


Just a question. Which do you find funnier: a little girl dying of cancer in excruciating pain and being taken from her father, or some forty years old guy brutally raping a church going 13 years old girl making her feel so ashamed because she thinks that somehow she brought it on that she can no longer look her father in the face because she knows how much she will disgust him if he knew?

I'm sure I will find your answer amusing.    

Dale

wow. I am not entirely certain my somewhat lazy critique suggesting your poem is overly sentimental and twee justified such a character assassination, but then again, nor does posting a picture of an ex-girlfriend warrant my over-reaction, and to be fair I think my reaction is pretty funny too, in hindsight. (although, I am also not sure how the two conceptual spaces overlap in any meaningful way. Also, I don't think an emotional response to something is the same as the sentimentality of something.)
But I genuinely did think when I first read it that you were making some sort of parody of that 'type' of poem, which I thought was amusing. And then I realised it was for real, and found that funny, as well. I can't help it that I am a bit of a prick sometimes, it's genetic(:. I at no point found the idea of a child dying of cancer funny. nor a child being raped. Yet, if someone wrote a twee little poem about a 13 year old church going girl being raped, I would conceivably find the poem itself funny. Were the poem specifically about one of my own children (written by someone else), I would hopefully have a different emotional response, but if the poem was shit, it could possibly still be amusing, or would probably just piss me off.

Point taken. I thought your initial reaction was unclear in regards to this. It appeared to me that you thought the subject was funny, and I thought that is how others might read it. If it is simply my poem which is humorous because it is poorly written you should know that I am OK with that. However to be a "character assassination" I would have needed to target you directly, until you told everyone that was about you, until then it was just a little joke between you and I. Of course such things are easy to misinterpret; Est-ce pas mon ami? Alternatively, my response was an attempt for you to restore yourself to "respectability" by clarifying your response as I thought you might, but could not be certain. It is gratifying that you did. I only asked you questions that I thought others would want answered because they don't understand you are a well meaning prick like I do  As am I.

dale

No harm no foul.

My initial comment was misjudged in its simplicity, and as I said, lazy.

I will just give a more comprehensive, less likely to be misinterpreted, account of my position on the poem itself.

These kind of poems are very difficult to write well. But, ironically, there is a kind of 'anything will do' sense about them, simply because the subject matter is so serious. But I cannot help thinking that that is only the popular opinion. I have heard and even given many harsh criticism of emo poetry dealing with suicide and self-harm, which in reality must be an awful thing to go through... but that said, the poetry produced by these emotional experiences tends to be mawkish and terribly written. The subject doesn't save a bad poem. Or, it shouldn't. And when the poem is a 3rd person account of an experience only vicariously encountered, then a well meaning bad poem can be just as offensive as a cynical poem written well. I am not suggesting your poem is offensive, of course, just it isn't very good and really doesn't add anything to the story other than a diary entry that 'children dying of cancer sucks; and fathers being criminalised trying to help them, sucks, too. Don't we live in a shit world?'

or something like that. The fact is, I really can't talk, because I simply have stopped being able to write poetry, so feel free to entirely dismiss everything I have said

No, you are completely correct. This is not a very good poem, nor did I intend it as such. I spent less than five minutes on this and in terms of the finer points of poetics it shows. As I said in response to AJ's comments,

"Thanks AJ. Yes, this was never meant to be much of a poem, mainly just a way to inform about the story. It was a write once and post sort of thing..."

I took for granted you had read the other comments, the error is mine, as this shows, since I had already conceded this was in fact not a good poem, my assumption was your comments were in regard to something other than the critique itself. My bad. I agree the poem lacks any substantial depth, or any depth at all. I also agree with your general thesis, "The subject doesn't save a bad poem." If only others would learn the same thing.

best,

dale