It was a tragedy.<\/p>\n
She was the captain’s daughter. She was found in the dim surf tied to the mast of the wreckage. Her bosom was white and her long hair swirling. I was\u00a012 and a boy and the bosom thing is mostly what I remember and she was dead. Her father had tried to save her and thus killed her.<\/p>\n
And I was dying up in front of the class. Miss Hepburn as our English teacher had made us each memorize\u00a0two thousand\u00a0lines of poetry. We had to recite on command. Procrastinator, I, I faltered badly there in the surf with the captain’s daughter.\u00a0I couldn’t rescue her or myself. I couldn’t remember the words.<\/p>\n
As if I had a choice I chose the greater humiliation. I broke down and sobbed there at the blackboard.\u00a0Miss Hepburn\u00a0told me to take my seat. I did so sloppily. Relieved it was over, I cried quietly at my desk. My colleagues were embarrassed. They backed away. Fear of contagion.\u00a0The whole school would hear.<\/p>\n
It was a tragedy. It was my introduction to poetry.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It was a tragedy. She was the captain’s daughter. She was found in the dim surf tied to the mast of the wreckage. Her bosom was white and her long hair swirling. I was\u00a012 and a boy and the bosom thing is mostly what I…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":255,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-marathon-poem"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/255"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8687"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8687\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15312,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8687\/revisions\/15312"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}