Rewritten - The donor one.

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Robin
Junior Member

since 1999-08-07

Posts 48
Cardiff, Wales, UK

0 posted 1999-09-05 10:03 AM

For Want of Reason
Robin Laffan

To save a life,
But not yours.
You’re not worth the use of my heart,
My spleen, my kidneys
To taint my memory
Raising you to undeserved heights

Machinery hums
My life dims
Fading as I await
A donor to remember
A chance to go one
For want of a heart

What are you to me,
Inhuman,
Less than the rats in my hallway
No use, unloved by God
That I do you a favour
Just letting you cease to be

The longer I live
The less I become
Knowing there is no saviour
No god, no second chance
Just pain and death
For want of mercy

You don’t deserve my heart,
None of you do
Why should I let you live
To sully the world
Bearing my heart in your chest
Bringing me down to your level

Yet I hear of a chance
Passing me by
Since a man has chosen
I have not the right
To survive him
For want of white skin

My heart is my gift
My legacy
A chance for a white man to live
Not for you, or your kind
Who should die, never be born
Whose existence is a sin to god.

Each breath is a chore
A searing tear
In the fragment of my life
That becomes the whole
All I’ve had to say
For want of humanity

After all you comments and suggestions I rewrote this one quite a lot. It's not been easy, trying to get into the spirit of the donor and understand him. I realise that I have failed and have merely produced a series of invectives, this one isn't finished.

roxane
Senior Member

since 1999-09-02

Posts 505
us

1 posted 1999-09-05 10:49 AM

I thought that this was very good and very touching.

------------------
"Come night, come darkness, for you cannot come too soon or stay too long in such a place as this." Charles Dickens

roxane

Brad
Member Ascendant

since 1999-08-20

Posts 5705
Jejudo, South Korea

2 posted 1999-09-07 02:42 AM

I do like this one better. I like the contradiction between not believing in God on the one hand, 'knowing there is no saviour' with the utter idiocy of calling any part of creation a 'sin to god'. I also like 'inhuman' standing by itself -- a double play for the speaker and whom he is speaking about.

Nevertheless, I don't think you've captured the 'voice' of the speaker yet. Your own disgust keeps seeping through with 'for want of humanity' and 'to save a life' 'but not yours'.

Admittedly, I am unsure how to handle the dynamics of racism in the UK. Certainly, you don't have the same hatred, the same sheer irrationalism that charaterizes the US but I've been reading some Faulkner short stories recently and wonder if they might be of help. Also, there's a line from 'Mississippi Burning' that has always stuck in my head. Gene Hackman is talking about his father who after destroying a black man's property for no other reason than because he's black says (I paraphrase) that if I'm not better than a black man than who am I better than.

To a racist, it's not the idea of lifting them up so much as their 'inferiority' is necessary for their own false sense of identity.

Can this help? I don't know.

Maybe you should sit on it for awhile and come back to it after a month or two -- you may be too close, your anger too strong, to get the voice the way you, I think, want.

Still, a very powerful message and one that I want to be the best you can possibly make it.
Thanks,
Brad

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