Becoming A Public Poet // To My Siblings
Blood Ties: As The Eldest - Part 3
To My Siblings:
Matt, I was often impressed
By you at your best:
Exploring our childhood island.
The ditches, the fields
And boardwalk. As peals
Of all the bird choruses
Rang out to greet us
The plovers and mallards,
Rare red-winged blackbirds,
Chickadees, thrushes, herons and crows.
Cormorants too;
I know mum used to tell you
She loved to watch them sun-drying.
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Mariel too, I’s impressed by how you
Stay so caring of everyone's feelings
My usual bent is to keep to myself
And care not a bit what they all think
But I’m trying to be (now that I’m past 33)
A bit more in the middle to balance
The selfish and selfless (and you helped inspire this)
To keep this whole rigamarole still rolling.
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With regret I look back
To times that are past
And realize with a growing dismay
That so often I’ve been flagellatingly focused
That very predictably I’ve closed out those closest.
As Lewis has said thus humility is;
Think not less of your self but your self less.
So: It’s quite an new thing
For this elder sibling
To think quite so much ‘bout his youngers
Now it’s been happening often
But perhaps I’m just watching
With eyes that are looking to See Them.
- N.C-JI’ve slotted this poem in my ongoing Blood Ties series about how family affects everything around us, but I think it could also fit in my mini-collection An Unfolding. Those poems paint the journey of a man seeking to rediscover lost emotions; or even unearth some yet undiscovered.
There are lots of things I regret from my youth and young adulthood — one of those is not following through on what I feel are the innate responsibilities of an older brother. I’ll let the poem speak for itself in that regard; I want to briefly talk about regret as an emotion.
I was seeing a psychotherapist nearly a decade ago, and the practitioner asked me why I still carried with me those things I regretted from my past; they asked if there wasn’t a good reason why I did or did not do the those things at the time.1 This may be true, of course, there may have been good reasons why.
But I have to know before I can stop regretting. Our regrets can and perhaps should be tracked down and examined, only then to be released. Why do I regret? What do I regret? Am I regretting something worthwhile? Was I powerless in that situation? Was I simply scared? How can I act differently when next I am placed in such a time?
The River of Regret is a part of the Emotional Frontier like any other. We must walk alongside and seek to ford. It may be too wide to cross. It seems mistier perhaps, down here. Filled with a dark and sorrowful music of missed opportunities.
Perhaps the River is not so wide as first it seemed. It is but a narrow Creek. We come across it and see a branch, stuck widthways, bumping but immobile in the flow between two rocks. Pry it free and watch it sail down past what’s already been explored.
I climb on my donkey and continue forward into the mist. The music is quieter now.
Some brief bonus thoughts inspired by one of John Keats’ lesser known sonnets, To My Brothers.
Such a simple and heartfelt sentiment of desiring a smooth quiet night at the end of a good birth-day. The sense of being in the room with one’s family, sitting and thinking around the fire as the ingrained rules of how we relate to each other keep us safe. I feel as though I’m in the room with them, in a moment that didn’t last.2
While the poem is lovely to read, I like what it signifies about this moment in their relationship. John’s poem was found written and signed in his brother Tom’s notebook, unpublished until after his death. This poem being some sort of present from brother to brother, is inspiring for me. This came on the back of a recent post I really liked by
who wrote about the position of being a Public Poet: describing the joy it can be to offer poems as gifts, acknowledgements, or general tokens in service to others. So, these poems today for my siblings are also an acknowledgement that I am, I suppose, some sort of Public Poet. A work in progress and quality not guaranteed (yet).Thank you for reading and commenting, it’s always great to hear from you!
I was not admitting heinous crimes. More along the lines of failures of responsibilities, of taking action, of falling short.
The Keats family story is complex - the brothers supported each other, but with the pressures of chronic sickness and constant struggle to earn a living, their relationships became strained, though they stayed in touch. George moved to America, Tom died of TB at age 18, and John died three years later at 25, or the same disease.