The direct inspiration for this poem was the poem “Lesson” by Forrest Hammer, a poem about the protection that a father offers a boy and the anger felt at his unexplainable loss.

I used a style here that is unusual for me of late, in that I do not much punctuation to assist with reading the poem out loud–no em dashes, not many commas.

I list words side by side to suggest that they are interchangeable in the poem, each touching on a different scene. The most prominent example is the first stanza where I list the many different relationships that might be a parent to someone. I include “wolf” here. A bit cheeky, but a reference to the wild child left in the woods as a babe and raised by wolves.

I’ve got to cover the bases.

I worked quite a bit with my poetry mentor. They used a different method to help me see the poem with outside eyes, giving me strengths and suggestions for revision for each stanza. You can read that exchange here if you are interested in that background.

I range here from generalizations of moments when you might recognize that your parent is not infallible–the list of such things in the sixth stanza–to specific incidents that I took from my own experience: the fall off the dock and falling while running with my arms in my jacket.

Whether this works to ground the poem for the reader I don’t know. Perhaps a poet never knows.

As I wrote I realized I was being general and sought to bring it to the specific. I perhaps could have gone back and rewritten the whole thing. A poem has momentum though and I reached a point where I was unwilling to redo the whole thing.

Mostly, though, this was because the poem was working in my mind.

I made many revisions, though, which you can see in my exchange with my poetry mentor.

An unusual change was one I made in the first line of the poem. I find that the first line I write tends to stick.

In this case though I went from “the moment you learn your parent” to “the snap pop moment you learn your parent”, making that moment audible and substantive.

This was driven partially because I was trying to make the DPST switch have more clarity–unless you are familiar with types of switches this one perhaps is easy to glean over.

To help with this I made the title of the poem the name of the switch with the acronym “DPST”. Picture when Frakenstein’s monster is born in one of the movies where the electricity is summoned–Dr. Frankenstein grasps a handle on a wall and pulls it down (or pushes it up).

An Easter egg in the poem is the line “calls or arms” which echoes of a “call to arms”, the type that knights might respond to in an emergency.

My favorite word in the poem is “murk”–I had written “murky” originally but it didn’t fit the pattern I’d set up of using nouns. Dropping the “y” gave it the weight in the poem it needed there.

It’s a rainy day today–that itself might have been the inspiration for this poem. I’m sitting in our new sunroom listening to the patter of raindrops and looking out the window at a conspicuous puddle in the gravelly mud.