fire in my bones

I am taking a poetry workshop class. We write poems and then everyone critiques them. We also read published poetry and analyze the craft.

I've found that I cannot write (in good conscious) poems about things that do not deeply affect me. I cannot write about the orange on the table unless it has first affected me in some way. I cannot write about the pretty day just for the sake of prettiness. So I put little pieces of my soul into my poems, and I prepare to have them misunderstood in workshop. I've had poems workshopped before this class and it is always painful. But I can't- I refuse to write any other way.

Today I had a poem workshopped. It hurts me less that they do not understand my poem, but more that this fire in my bones to tell these stories isn't understood. I want them to want to know about M, I want them to look at my writing from their souls, not their American minds. I want them to step outside their own understanding and let my words tell a story. It hurts that I do not know how to do that. That my professor thought the poem was about lesbians. No. The scandalous had nothing to do with her body, but just that she was dancing at all. My life is scandalous because I wear my hair loose and long and ballroom dance with men. Me. It doesn't have to have the American view of scandalous to mean anything.

I wanted them to critique it, yes. I want it to be a good poem. I appreciate their suggestions for taking out the words that do not mean anything, for moving around the stanzas, for adding more, for deleting some of the lines. I appreciate their argument over the word Afghanistan.

What hurts is that they do not understand. That I am unable to make them understand. That they do not really care to understand, and that it is my job to pull them in, and I can't really do that.

Before the workshop started I sat in my seat and tried to steady myself. I was excited to let the refugee stories breathe again, let this huge thing that has changed my life take a bit of the spotlight of the day. I wanted it to be read as something important, maybe as something that was part of me. But people don't care.

It hurts me that I am a bad story teller. That I can't manage to get Miss M's story out there in a way that they will understand and appreciate her. It's not about me. It's about her, and all of the stories like hers. I want them told in America. I don't know how to do that.

But if I say, "I will not mention him or speak any more in his name," his word is in my heart like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot. Jeremiah 20:9