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What Rude Magic Is This (A Poem)
With the background of how I wrote it
By accident, I lost three poems I’d drafted over several years. They had always felt incomplete to me, but as I reflect on them now, they complete each other. It’s often best to delete a failed draft (or two or three) and start over from memory and from the heart. This is an example of how it works.
How the Disappeared Poems Fit Together
Three half-forgotten poems become one.
1. A poem about being cheated by the boss
I wrote a poem based on a moment in the life of a man named Jacob. Though Jacob happens to be a Biblical character, I didn’t mean the poem as a heavy-handed religious teaching, nor one that requires the reader to have any kind of faith. I was simply assuming Jacob as a widely recognizable fictional character, and I was imagining a pivotal moment in his life when he learns something about his marriages and his relationship with his boss.
In the Biblical story, Jacob agrees to work seven years to marry his boss’s daughter, Rachel. At the end of the seven years, the boss cheats him by giving him his other daughter, Leah, and he tells Jacob to work seven more years if he wants the daughter originally promised. Jacob agrees.
