Sherry Chandler

The Warrior

Because JimT has drawn my attention to the NewsHours poetry series (see comments), I discovered this Mother’s Day feature they did with poet Francis Richey. Richey has written The Warrior (Penguin Group, 2008), a series of 28 poems to her son, a Green Beret who has served two tours in Iraq.

She wrote the poems because she opposed the war in which her son was fighting, because she couldn’t understand what her son was becoming, and because she didn’t want to lose him:

I didn’t realize that these poems would be a bridge back to Ben. I just felt like they were helping me to live with the reality that there was distance between us and that I might never be able to bridge it.

But they gave me a way to explore and try to understand, try to understand things from his point of view.

It was scary to write these poems. I was afraid. When I wrote “Kill School,” I was afraid of what was going to show up on the page, because you can’t control it. You have to just let yourself write. And then to show him that poem was a little scary, too.

As a mother of sons, I found this segment shattering.

Go and read the sample poems.

Watch the video.

It puts things in perspective.

Transcript here. Video here.

Frances Richey’s web site and her blog.

1. Warrior Poets
2. Portrait of a warrior
3. The Purple People Bridge
4. Is a poet who fights a warrior?
5. Paper houses, paper bridges…

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