The piece I chose to imitate is
entitled “Waiting for Tomorrow in Assisted Living,” and can be found in Helen
Alderfer’s The Mill Grinds Fine. At
first glance, this poem appears to be a rather depressing eulogy of the
speaker’s youth, but the final stanza reassures the reader that these doubts
and fears “are passengers in a boat in a safe harbor / with pilots of skill and
compassion.”
Ms. Alderfer’s poetic voice is
simple, straightforward, and easily understood. Critics might think her work
lacks complexity, but I believe that her
easy to read style allows for a deeper connection with her audience. Her
similes and metaphors do exactly what they are meant to do, which is to conjure
a vivid image in the reader’s mind. Take, for example, the first line of
“Waiting for Tomorrow in Assisted Living:”
When
a flight of stairs looks as daunting as Mt. Kilimanjaro
Where
gourmet meals taste like sawdust
To
those who have no appetite
The flight of stairs being compared to Mt. Kilimanjaro could
be argued as a hyperbolic simile lacking complexity, but I argue that Ms.
Alderfer is not exaggerating as much as some might think. Speaking as a person who
is only 20 years old, I can only imagine what having joint pain or arthritis
would feel like, but I’m sure it would make a flight of stairs look like Mt.
Kilimanjaro. Regarding the simplicity of this comparison, I believe a strong
writer doesn’t need to rely on extravagant, wordy comparisons in order to reach
the audience. Can you imagine a gourmet meal tasting like sawdust? This is
another example of a simple, yet very effective comparison.
The poem’s
structure is a single14-line stanza, followed by a one-line stanza, and
concluding with a four line stanza. The 14-line stanza deals with questions and
doubts about living in assisted living, which Ms. Alderfer experienced for
herself in Waterford Crossing Retirement Home. These issues range from low
energy, to table conversations exclusively about pain and pills, to a “dead
mailbox” that can “hurt all day,” the line that concludes the first stanza. The
concerns of the speaker build to this point, and the tension is released in the
next one-line stanza, which is just, “Do not be deluded.” The last stanza
continues to ease the tension and provides a more hopeful outlook to help
resolve the issues in stanza one. In imitating this work I tried to preserve
the structure Ms. Alderfer has, with the tension building and falling away in
the same places. I kept a few lines verbatim from the original poem, the most
important being “Do not be deluded,” the one sentence second stanza.
Helen
Alderfer’s straightforward style was a lot of fun to imitate, and despite the
subject matter of “Waiting for Tomorrow in Assisted Living” being alien to me,
I resonated strongly with the underlying themes of loneliness, reminiscence,
and growing older.
Waiting for Tomorrow in a College House
When a walk with you is as draining as a marathon
When words flop like escaped fish on the deck of a boat
because the
fisherman is inept
When energy is so low that it is impossible
to imagine
that we walked for hours,
carving our
path into the night
Where casual conversation concentrates on
parties,
boys, and how-are-yous,
not words
that break the ice between us
When I remember your past and can predict a storm
dancing on
our doorstep
When the old familiar contact
is too much
or too little
Where a dead phone can hurt all day.
Do not be deluded.
We are passengers in the boat of our 20s
with pilots
who are unpredictable,
bumping
into each other, or steering away
when we
have grown apart.
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