The Guardian, The man, and the boy inside

This poem came about as a result of a desire to portray a scene from a novel in poetic form. In
some ways, it was vanity, attempting to take what I felt was poetry in prose and turn it into a poem all
my own, but I was too moved by the scene to not attempt it.
There are three figures in the scene, though due to the dual nature of one, the total number of
entities to be referenced are four. The first is the Guardian, who is an angel come to earth to provide
solace and perspective.
The second is the man referenced in the title, an angry and violent human being. The third is the
boy inside the man, the honesty beneath all of the pain and anger. This distinction is essential to the
poem, as one of the major themes is that negative emotions like anger are symptoms, and that it takes a
gentle and loving hand to address the real problems.
The fourth entity is the person for whom all of the pain and anger are being felt. In another room, the
best friend of the man is dying. Powerless to help, the man screams about the cruelty and lack of
fairness in the situation, and the child inside cries.
The largest struggle structurally for this poem was addressing each entity as concisely as
possible, while still avoiding pronoun issues. An early awareness of this helped, resulting in The
Guardian being referenced with capitalization, which is indicated in the title. This proved sufficient
until the last portion of the poem, based on reader feedback.
Unfortunately, being the author and knowing the scene in question, it is difficult to sort out
exactly where the confusion lies. The poem's title is meant to do much of the heavy lifting, spelling out
who the various he's are, the only reference to the fourth entity via pronoun being a his in the midst
of the only stanza discussing him.
Even with this, early drafts of the poem struggled toward the end, resulting in word salads like
He(The Guardian) raises his(the child's) chin, turns the young gaze upward. He (The Guardian) turns
his (The man's) gaze away from the... which was simply unworkable. Because of the nature of the

work, I opted to use tag words, or the concept that certain words or ideas were tied to a specific
character in the poem, to help clear things up.
Examples of this include hands and any reference to their actions, being exclusive to The
Guardian, a point belabored in the first stanza. For the man, defiance is used in the first and second to
last stanzas, the intent being to tie together that the defiant glare, previously mentioned as being present
while the man was standing alone before God (who, in most religions, is associated with the sky and
thus an upward glance) is the same glare being cast downward, back toward Earth. In the same way,
tears are used to reference the boy, as he is the only one explicitly crying in the poem.
By this, the last three stanzas are meant to be easy to read, if one follows the context clues; The
boy, crying and leaning into the hand, has his gaze turned upward and away from the situation that has
the child so upset. By this, The Guardian says The best way I can comfort you is by showing you the
bigger picture. I can show you who's really in control here. This looks bad, but there's nothing to be
afraid of, because God is just and kind. Don't focus on what you can see, but on what is true. The man,
angry and defiant, has his gaze turned away, as if to say You're calling God unfair, but not paying
attention to what he's actually doing. Look! The poem then closes on the friend gasping, indicating
that he has begun to breathe again. Given the implied dying/death of the friend, this closing line
indicates that The Guardian is right to correct the boy, who was afraid and the man, who felt cheated
and betrayed.
Whether the flow should be obvious and the truth of whether it is or not are two separate issues,
unfortunately. Despite the work put into making the distinctions clear, the resounding feedback was I
can't tell how many people are in the poem!/I can't tell who is who! while simultaneously knowing
that being too heavy-handed on explanations and the like has been a repeat problem in my work, both
in and out of the class. Ergo, further applications of tag words might do the job, but would make the
poem more wordy and, frankly, given that they went unnoticed the first time around, might only make
the situation worse.

Another consideration was bolding the text for one character, italicizing for another, and so on.
This was opted out of on account of not wanting to distract the reader, or, in a peer review, lead to focus
on the choice of font changes rather than the substance of the poem. For similar reasons as well as
printing limitations, color was also rejected.
The easiest option would be to change some genders around. If The Guardian is a she, the
situation might be cleared up, but he seemed to have the strongest presence, and thus needed the least
clarification. Changing the gender on either the boy or the man might lead to some interesting
explorations of gender identity or associations of gender with emotions, but that was not the focus of
the poem, and it felt very likely to spark a debate on that, rather than the material in question. Changing
the friend's gender, as mentioned above, would be largely ineffectual, as a gender pronoun for the
friend occurs exactly once.
For the above reasons, barring a total re-write, the only substantial feedback requesting change
is either currently beyond my ken, or at risk of taking away from what I consider to be essential to the
poem. Perhaps that could be avoided by changing the title to something like DO NOT FOCUS ON
THE GENDER ROLES or THE COLORS DON'T MATTER but of course, this would also be
counter-productive.
Maybe I'm just being stingy and whiny, but after three pages of consideration, the only revision
I would make is to change the bottom lines of stanza 5, which read
A love older than the stars His light
Makes look like mere fireflies
The change made would be to break the line after the word than so as to make clear that what
follows has no comma or pause.
Thus, the poem reads;

His hands, coated in light, unmarred skin

digits long and soft, laying at rest

on the cheek of the small boy
inside the man
ragged and rigid
like a sculpture from iron cut
his eyes twinkle like a totem of defiance lit
by standing alone before God
In the next room over, the boy's friend lies
macabre wires and tubes hanging around his mangled body
The man screams out, his voice raw as a cooling corpse
impertinently demanding answers
while the boy inside leans on that unmarred hand
tears, like diamonds, running down
His light touch brushes the boy's tears
thumb wiping them away with all the care
of a man handling a live wire
His own eyes burn with compassion
a love older than
the stars His light makes look like mere fireflies
He raises the boy's chin
turns the young gaze upward
away from the barbarous operation
He casts the defiant glare down
the boy's friend gasps
together, they see
the mercy of God