Poem: “Durum Wheat”

From today’s Writers Almanac, this wonderful poem by Lisa Martin-Demoor:

DURUM WHEAT

Memory at its finest lacks corroboration
 — no photographs, no diaries — 
nothing to pin the past on the present with, to make it stick.
Just because you’ve got this idea
of red fields stretching along the tertiary roads
of Saskatchewan, like blazing, contained fires — 
just because somewhere in your memory
there’s a rust-coloured pulse
taking its place among canola yellow
and flax fields the huddled blue of morning azures — 
just because you want to
doesn’t mean you can
build a home for that old, peculiar ghost.

Someone tells you you’ve imagined it,
that gash across the ripe belly of summer,
and for a year, maybe two, you believe them.
Maybe you did invent it, maybe as you leaned,
to escape the heat, out the Pontiac’s backseat window
you just remembered it that way
because you preferred the better version.

Someone tells you this.
But what can they know of faith?
To ask you to leave behind this insignificance.
This innocence that can’t be proved: what the child saw
of the fields as she passed by, expecting nothing.

You have to go there while there’s still time.
Back to the red flag of that field, blazing in the wind.
While you’re still young enough to remember
a flame planted along a road. While you’re still
seeing more than there is to see.

As always, note how poems use strong, visual words to create images and feelings. It’s the same writing ‘muscle’ screenwriters need to use in scene description. But more than that, two other things.

* Our memories are a vast resource for our writing. We can dip into them to use moments in our past and share them with the characters we create. Then those moments can take on their own meaning, reshaped by this new persona we’re crafting who transforms our past into their life-experience.

* “While you’re still seeing more than there is to see.” That, too, is the magic of screenwriting. For in every scene, while something happens (External World — action and dialogue), something else is happening (Internal World — intention and subtext). So open your eyes to see the deeper dimensions of what’s happening — see more than there is to see.