Did It Hurt You? (revised)

[Heartafire]

any comments and suggestions more than welcome.

hi heart,
strangely, I feel empathetic with this one. You rarely present a clear target to shoot at and you have not done so here. A third read only gave me that same old feeling that haunts me...why are we writing in such short lines? This is a mournful piece ( or bemournful as a sergism) and the tight reins gallop the beast in an undignified way. Are you wanting to rant this one or psalm it? For me, it is a slow lament. I could see the first three lines, a sentence, on one line. The next two lines, a sentence, on one line....and so on, throughout the piece. If rhythm is suspended for no real gain then let the reader make the breaks. To permit this you may have to accept that you are writing prose...nothing wrong with that but then you have to breathe the piece rather than just write it. A line by line under these circumstances is pointless...moreso because I can feel the emotion in the context as written. As I said, empathetic and so culpably as wrong as you may be
Best,
tectak

I was just a child,
what were you thinking,
dying , just like that?
Who would I have to blame for my failures,
my bad decisions?

I’m grown up now, may I still use you to
ease the guilt of my misguided behavior.
I have a kid of my own, can I still blame you for
the unhappiness in my life?

You were not the perfect Mom.
Did you give much thought to me when you were sick?
You did not have the courtesy to get well.
You left me in the care of that man who did his best,
sadly lacking the skills to teach life to a young girl.

There was Grandmamma, who taught me well that
the touch of a boy would bring haji.
Shame, on the family, and she would have to care for it.

Though I fought mightily,
I bled when he ran his hand up my dress.
I feared I would need to kill myself.
Finally, I found no shame would be
delivered to us this time.

He took you to your homeland in an urn.
I have no place to mourn.
That is your fault too.
Could you not leave me your remains?

Surely you are to blame for any pain
that I may suffer.
Here is your elegy.
I need someone to blame.

Hi Tectak, thanks so much for reading and commenting. If this made you feel empathetic I will consider it a success. Seriously, I very much appreciate your ideas regarding this lament/rant. Originally, it was prose and I rearranged it. Short lines are a personal style that I am unable to change to date. I will work on this, lengthen the thoughts/sentences rather than breaking them abruptly. Thank you again for your time and opinion.
my best,
Heart

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Just a note on the structure of this poem for Tom, because I have commented on the poem to the poet somewhere else already.

in nuce:

Lament or mourning perhaps fits it better than psalm, I think, Tom. Psalms I find, lack these constrasting, even contradictory emotions. (Of course the Od Testament psalms can start with a lamentation over the facts and then call for a supernatural invisible but still not disprovable power like spaghetti monsters and teacups in space, but they would not be ambilvalent about the same person they address.
(A lament can contain ranting, or angry lines,( I will later show what I mean showing some lines of atras da porta*)
and then switching back to crying over the loss.
A lament** would describe or cover the phases of coping with the loss of ... anything dear, and then end. Not so here:

Now a tragic loss in early childhood will have an impact on the further life of the person (been there ,-) not la negative one. but the point that you must grown up to consciously start to cope with it. if anything works out fine (think david copperfield etc) bc the child has been able to (subconsciously deal with that trauma (congrats then) and/or lucky or helpful circumstances: al fine. If not: one will not be spared to deal with what did not go so well, at a later point in life. First step: reflect on what happened in order to find out where to start the healing. The poetic I in this poem can well represent millions of children, whose parents died in the 2 WWs, very common for the first 2 generations of the 20th in Europe.



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*these lines quoted from:
http://letras.mus.br/chico-buarque/45113/
I quote from this song because first I love it but more importantly the lyrics show in just a handful of lines the different phases of grief over lost ones. (that's why: in nuce. ,-) )
Had there been a good English translation I would used that. (as if you believed it for a second. ,-) )

[...] atrás da porta
reclamei baixinho.
Dei pra maldizer o nosso lar,
pra sujar teu nome, te humilhar

bc you French (fixed it a bit) let me quote that:

"derrière la porte
je me suis plaint doucement
Compte tenu de maudire notre maison.
pour salir ton nom, te humilier ...

So this the plot: (not a translation, but what I know it means (been there)

She bemourns the death of her lover.

1) when they last looked deep into each other eyes,
she (now, in hindsight, thought she had
already known , he would die soon.
2) She finds him dead. Despite the premonition
she cannot believe it , she tosses him around, (she must make sure he is really dead by touching him, she shakes him to wake him up etc, finally strokes his hair as to give him a last touch of love.

3) she sits behind the door of the room where she found him and cries lowly, bemourning ( you know referring to the sergism, lol, ty for that by the way. Ok but back to serious

and now the ranting starts: to talk badly about our home (love implied maybe).
to defame your name, to humiliate you ….

**I mean lament as in bemoaning beloved ones, like here:
http://www.shakespeares-sonnets.com/sonnet/30

There are other kinds of laments of course like the Li Sao from the Chuci
(big fan of David Hawkes, but this rendering is pretty fine, too. A real serendipity for me.
The plot /narrative could have been written by Gurkski combining 2 totally different strains (shamanism and politics. Not bad. ,-)
No. It is a (collection of) fine and obscure texts and for people interested in ancient southern „China“ and Southeast Asia a very important source, if difficult to put into context.

http://www.chinapage.org/poem/quyuan/quyuan-e.html





serge

Hi Serge, thank you for reading and commenting and your amazing insight into my lament/rant. Thank you for the links, Li Sao and references to Atras da Porta which I adore.
till soon,
Holly