Can you go through the step-by-step process of writing this poem from the moment the idea was first conceived in your brain until final form? It is more difficult than I thought to narrow down the most emotional poem I’ve written! There are a few really close candidates including one I wrote about my grandfather’s war injuries during WWII and a former student of mine who became a Marine and was killed in Afghanistan. There’s a poem I wrote when I had had my first teaching job as a middle school English teacher in a very urban area about the violence that had overtaken the neighborhood, the same neighborhood my grandparents had lived in only a generation before. I “retired” that poem from my readings because I don’t have it in me to look at it again.
So I’ve come to the conclusion that right now, the most emotional poem that I’ve written and can cogently speak about is one I wrote in April, 2019, called “The Last Straw.” Earlier that year I found out I had a hereditary liver disease that was not going to let up on its own accord. By April it was decided that I needed surgery if I was to have any hope at living longer than a handful of years. I had been having all types of blood work and MRIs, CT scans, and scans I don’t even know the name of. I had finally scheduled the surgery when I received a call from my veterinarian. My dog, Sadie, was a 13-year-old Sheltie who my wife and I had had since she was ten weeks old. She had gotten much slower with age and spent most of her time laying around trying to get her belly rubbed, but she had lost her appetite, which was strange. I made an appointment at the vet who had been taking care of her since we adopted her and he ran a bunch of tests. The phone call was to let me know that she indeed had cancer, a very aggressive cancer that had spread throughout her body. I was shocked. I asked what treatment he recommended and was told that there was no treatment. This was it. By this point he gave her maybe 48 hours. My wife and I were devastated.
Later that night I laid down on the floor with her, rubbed her belly, and she just looked at me with her big eyes. I had never had a dog before and I was not prepared for this at all. It was at that moment that the realization of my own condition hit me. Even though I had been told by numerous doctors how serious my condition was I still felt the same way I did when I was a teenager: nothing can hurt me. Laying on the floor with Sadie I was overcome with the fact that it was very possible neither one of us had very long and she was taking this all better than I was. It’s strange to say but I could see her accept her mortality and try to tell me that she would be okay. I then realized that I was not ready to go anywhere, not with my two daughters still in elementary school.
I went up into my bedroom and typed out a quick version on my phone and saved it in my Notes. Later that night I retyped it into it’s final, published form. When I woke the next morning, Sadie was gone.
Where were you when you started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great detail. I started to write this in my head, like I usually do, but luckily, I was able to actually type it before I forgot it. I wrote it in my poorly lit bedroom, staring at my nightstand. The nightstand is covered with books, of course, and some Star Wars figures, a few Lego astronauts, a small piece of lava from Mount Fuji, pictures and crafts my daughters have made for me, my expired credit cards, receipts with the ink rubbed off, used gift cards, maybe $20 in loose change and, somewhere, my watch. The room itself has paintings and pictures waiting to be hung that are currently leaning against the walls. The only two things that have actually made it on the wall are a canvas with a reproduction of Banksy’s “Balloon Girl” and a sketch of Eeyore drawn by an artist when we visited Disney World on our honeymoon.
How many drafts of this poem did you write before going to the final? (And can you share a photograph of your rough drafts with pen markings on it?) There was a first draft and then later on that night, when I copied it from my phone to my laptop, the final draft. It happened pretty quickly.
What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? I guess that I’d want them to take away the fact that life changes so quickly that you really have to appreciate what you have because tomorrow you might not have it. For me personally, writing this was more about accepting the fact that I had an actual medical issue and that I was not, to my great surprise, going to live forever. It’s something that I know, intellectually, but never really accepted in practice. So, make the most of what you have and the people you have around you.
Which part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why? I think the lines “this is the last straw / I thought there’d be more straws” are still the most emotional for me because, to some extent, I still believe it – I did think there would be more opportunities, that things don’t necessarily end. But, obviously, they do.
Has this poem been published before? And if so where? I read this poem at a reading at The KGB Bar’s Red Room maybe a week or two after I wrote it. The reading curator, Virginia Valenzuela (Bottom Right), was the Editor-In-Chief of LIT Magazine, and after the reading asked me to send in some poems. Since this does not often happen, I quickly did. The editorial team there selected this poem and two others for inclusion in issue #33. It appears here: https://www.litmagazine.org/2019/08/31/three-poems-by-john-findura/
John Findura is the author of the poetry collection Submerged(Five Oaks Press, 2017). He holds an MFA from The New School, an M.Ed in Professional Counseling, and an Ed.D in Educational Technology. His poetry and criticism appear in numerous journals including Verse; Fourteen Hills; Copper Nickel; Pleiades; Forklift, Ohio; Sixth Finch; Prelude; and Rain Taxi. A guest blogger for The Best American Poetry, he lives in Northern New Jersey with his wife and daughters.
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