Writing poems based on journalistic reportage is perilous at the best of times. The poems risk becoming too freighted with the politics or moral implications of the event itself. Yet no poet, or poetic novelist, with blood in their veins can steer clear of the stranger-than-fiction events that fill the newspapers and airwaves. Regina poet and novelist Dave Margoshes takes on both the unspeakable and the ineffable in this poem about Robert Latimer’s decision to kill of his severely disabled daughter Tracy. The poem was written several years after the actual murder took place, but while news of the trial and its controversial verdict were very much in the public eye…
Writing poems based on journalistic reportage is perilous at the best of times. The poems risk becoming too freighted with the politics or moral implications of the event itself. Yet no poet, or poetic novelist, with blood in their veins can steer clear of the stranger-than-fiction events that fill the newspapers and airwaves. Regina poet and novelist Dave Margoshes takes on both the unspeakable and the ineffable in this poem about Robert Latimer’s decision to kill of his severely disabled daughter Tracy. The poem was written several years after the actual murder took place, but while news of the trial and its controversial verdict were very much in the public eye.
It begins with a blunt, prosaic couple of lines, more a legal statement than a true confession from the soul, but gradually evolves into the latter. Robert Latimer’s nature as a practical farmer is underlined in phrases of startlingly simple cadence, “I put her in the half-ton”, as simple a cadence as he uses to describe the black hose being on the bench “right there . . . where I left it.” By contrast, “we sat there for a while” offers a lingering pause, as father and daughter listen to a country & western song, (“Your Cheatin’ Heart” comes to this reader’s mind.)
The farmer in Latimer has decided to put down one of his own herd not meant to make it. His fateful decision is viewed against a much wider backdrop, that of an indifferent universe of stars, invisible by day to the eye, but winking down at Earth all the same. Only someone who has lived on the prairie can fully understand how the human element becomes minimized in contrast to the enormity of an infinite, featureless plain, beneath an immensity of unbroken sky.
Margoshes designs his lines to allow for rich openness and ambiguity. The words implicitly and explicitly exchanged between father and daughter are rendered in _cri de coeur_ italics rather than quotation marks. In the second stanza, the break “I got out, told her [_be right back, ain’t_]” makes the second line virtually nullify itself, before continuing: “[_I always?_] and went into the machine.” What machine is it that Latimer enters? Not merely the literal “machine / shed” of the break, but the machinery of fate, of doom”, of his own decision to objectify his beloved, suffering, insufferable daughter?
Star-crossed lovers, this father and daughter start out in the poem sharing a Country & Western song above the rumble of the car heater, a homey tableau shattered by a black snake filled with poison that chokes both its victim and her father/murderer. Snakes are, of course, symbols of temptation, and this father is about to give in to the same temptation transcended, or warded off, by all parents of all severely disabled children who face a lifetime of severe pain.
The last four lines are a powerful image of human vulnerability in an incomprehensible universe: “I stood in the barnyard / in the snow, my boots open, no gloves, / my hands cold, looking / up at those damned stars.”? It is an image you don’t have to be Robert Latimer to comprehend.