Not a Wasted Word - July 2 2022

 

Not a Wasted Word

July 2 2022

Our hard-working dad

believed in frugality.

Would rebuke us

when we were caught

gazing vacantly into the fridge

and muttering nothing to eat

as usual.

Or left the front door

open too long,

with a sharp what are you doing

heating the world?!!

No plate wasn't emptied,

no damn the expense

was ever heard.

Lights off, when we left a room,

and there you go again

drinking milk

like water.

So I am well-trained

to abhor waste.

The sins of the father

and all that.

Except for me

it's not a wasted word.

No turgid essays

or novel length indulgences.

Simple language,

short, sharp, terse.

My father would be proud.

I keep the heat down

extinguish lights

conserve sentences.

Have saved enough to have earned the right

to waste my life

on bad poetry.

This, he might not understand so well.

We're not made of money, he'd say

and how right he was;

so many hungry poets

who earn nothing from it.

Who have all the time in the world

to write

just for the love of it;

yet still cut all the fat

and never waste a word.

This poem began when I read something that referred to good writing, which ideally is simple, tight, no fat. The Hemingwayesque approach. But while prose can easily get prolix and elaborate, poetry rarely gets away with offending that rule. It's usually at its best when distilled, compressed, edited closely. Not a single wasted word. Which suits me fine, because I was indoctrinated from an early age in an ethos of no waste or extravagance.

Which made this a particularly difficult poem to write, because I didn't want to contradict myself. Especially since I favour a conversational tone in my poetry, which means that at its best it reflects how people actually speak. And in normal speech, language is hardly so closely policed!