✒ My Son, a Plowshare Be

A poem

Hark! A wild plowshare approaches.

I’m in the process of writing a really long, delicate, difficult essay about Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. It’s one of those pieces that starts simply and ends with more pain, angst, and Wikipedia links than originally expected.

In the interim, here is a poem. This one isn’t getting published anywhere anytime soon and it probably won’t win an award.

I wrote it during a high school assembly while watching three teenage boys slap each other on the leg and laugh. I was thinking of my own boyhood, and of all the times I got slapped, punched, kicked in the nuts, spanked, pantsed (pants-ed?) hit by foil hornets, rubber bands, belts, rat-tails, sticks, dodgeballs, basketballs, paintballs… and I was thinking how none of that was mean because they were my friends except the times they weren’t and it was. I was also thinking about all those times I slapped, punched, kicked in the nuts, spanked, (pants-ed?) etc. etc. other boys because I could. Because they were my friends and it was funny, except when they weren’t and it wasn’t.

I wonder why none of it— not even the rat-tail that (allegedly) split the scrotum of some kid at Word of Life Bible Camp— felt anywhere near as bad as being left out of a kickball game, or playing touch football and never getting a pass thrown my way? I’d go home after those (minor) exclusionary episodes and cry in my bed in the dark for an hour or more. I don’t think there was anything idiosyncratic about my experience and there was nothing that could be done about it.

And now I’m thinking about my own little two-year-old— my resolute pancake of endless affection. My star pointer. My tricycle trawler. My bold twinkle-twinkle misremember-er. My all-of-those-things-all-at-once-and-constantly. He’ll fetch you a band aid if you stub your toe. And he’ll cry and cry and then calm himself down and stir his pudding with a plastic spoon and smile warmly at the fact that there is pudding to be stirred.

My boy.

My boy will be one of those great big leg-slappers. He’ll be alone at sleepovers. He’ll sleep alone on his bunk at camp. He’ll walk onto sports fields by himself. And he may do whatever it takes to prove himself a member of the group, including kicking others in the nuts, rat-tailing etc. etc. And he may not do those things but he will certainly feel / cause isolation and pain. And he’ll feel / cause it in a male way.

My diligent little plowshare will be hammered into a sword. My heart will never recover.

Fortunately, ye olde’ King James offers the hope of hammering both ways; likewise, a boy— even one hardened by pummeling— can soften with time and age. This boy did. That boy can.

I hope hope can bridge the interval.

My Son, a Plowshare Be

Boys will be 
jocular, angular, brusque-throated 
and soft inside like doughnuts 
or fries. 

Wipe their chin with your 
thumb to get the chocolate. 
Ruffle straw-haired gold. 
Coax giggling counterpoise;

they’ll still get hammered 
at the end 
into jocular, angular, brusque-throated
boys.