One of the things I am always stressing in writing workshops is the importance of editing and redrafting, and how difficult it can be, sometimes, to get pupils in schools [and adults] to move from an entrenched position of, ‘it’s done, and nothing needs to change’, to looking at their work again, realising that it’s only a draft, and deciding what it is they are trying to say, and if they are saying it as well as they can. I always show them the first draft of my poem petals and its final published incarnation.

If you look at the two versions below, you will see how the first draft is carved and shaped, and very much cut down, to get to the final version. I also found a new stronger, starting point for my poem, and made it move from a purely autobiographical to a more universal [I hope] meaning. It took a month or so of thinking, considering, and generally playing about, to get it to its final form. See what you think of the two. Many, many young people in schools prefer the first version!!

Petals – first draft

I am trying to find a way to tell you I still think of you,
sitting here, peacefully in my house.
We were together for a long time,
and I pick up the old cornet you gave me all those years ago.

It is beautiful as an object,
I have it hanging on my wall.
And though I have never played an instrument
and neither did you,
we played a kind of music together
in the house we used to live in.
We spent time together doing things we loved,
whether it was gardening, or watching the birds which came to our bird-table
Do you remember all the things we used to do?

But the garden is untidy, and though birds still come to feed,
The music has stopped and the cornet no longer
has the piano to accompany it.
A long time has passed, and the cornet hangs like a brass rose on the wall with the other horns and instruments
like a complicated radiator.

But I still hear the music we played,
though there have been other tunes between,
and I always will.

petals

Remember the music we used to play?
The instruments still hang on the wall,
a trellis of brass roses
or an exotic vine with bugle flowers.
Like plumbing but not joined up,
and silent now.
And the lid of the piano is down.

The tunes still prickle in my blood,
and though blooming less
each successive year,
have kept a scent of you.
And the truth is
that I have grown older and loved others,
but I shall always carry some notes of your music
in my pockets, like petals,
wherever I go.

© James M Nash [Deadly Sensitive, Grassroots Press, 1999]