The Prince's Eyes

It is strange what you can recall when the past recedes, warps and forces you to reconsider certain moments.

This particular challenge is a challenge. Do we really remember the first time we wrote something just for ourselves? There is school, where the pen and paper are put in your hands and you are forced to write about things you may not care about, or to complete assignments that mean nothing to you. There are the letters and cards you might send to your friends, classmates and family. And then, if you do consider it, you want to write or create something of your own. All art is based on imitation of some kind. But I still have to wonder why I wrote that piece.

“The Prince’s Eyes”: it was the first thing I ever wrote just for me. I had written poetry in school for different assignments, even having a teacher share my work with someone because I had written something humorous (seeing an adult share your work as a child with another adult in praise must have had some influence on my young mind – it was in grade four). But why did I write that poem?

I was in high school, having just moved with the family to a new home and still unsure about what I wanted to major in (they streamed me into the “Advanced” group, a huge mistake). Math and Science dominated my days and my head (again, I have mentioned these difficult years in another piece on Vocal, so I won’t go too deep here). But I could not ignore that I loved books. When I was not on the guitar, I was at the library, or at the used bookstores that I discovered when I could not find a novel I needed to start a particular series. I wanted to see if I could do what I read. I wanted to know if I could write.

In my new room, with a legal pad and very little planning in mind, I started to put my thoughts down on the page. I had not set up an idea of what I wanted to say. I was not even writing lyrics for the guitar that I practiced on every weekend and Friday night (worth another story, I think). I just sat down and did it.

It was a poem about a prince looking over his land, his life and his people. I will not quote it all here, mainly because the fragment that I have saved is back home, hidden well in a folder, and I can only remember brief phrases and words I chose to use.

“The prince’s eyes looked…and blinked.”

I repeated that at the beginning and end of the poem, without the “and blinked”. Something about that impresses me. Also, I did not go out of my way to write a poem that followed a particular pattern of rhymes. This was probably due to the fact that we had studied e.e. cummings for the first time. It was “in Just-” that unzipped our heads and I realized that poetry could be anything the writer got on the page that did not follow the usual dull rules of the essays we were continually writing. There was a world of literature out there that I was just about to step into, even if I thought that it would be prose only. Poetry was something that was in a school reader, in a pop song on the radio or in a video, or in the cutting lines of an MC working over the beat of a sample.

But that was the first thing I wrote. That was the first step I took into that larger world.

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You can find more poems, stories, and articles by Kendall Defoe on my Vocal profile. I complain, argue, provoke and create...just like everybody else.

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