MAG

I wish to God I never saw you, Mag.
I wish you never quit your job and came along with me.
I wish we never bought a license and a white dress
For you to get married in the day we ran off to a minister
And told him we would love each other and take care of
each other
Always and always long as the sun and the rain lasts anywhere.
Yes, I'm wishing now you lived somewhere away from here
And I was a bum on the bumpers a thousand miles away
dead broke.
I wish the kids had never come
And rent and coal and clothes to pay for
And a grocery man calling for cash,
Every day cash for beans and prunes.
I wish to God I never saw you, Mag.
I wish to God the kids had never come.

A good poem to teach: simple language, repetition, no obscure references except bumpers (trains/boxcars); specific, concrete details: license and white dress, rent and coal and clothes. There’s that alliteration we like: bum, bumpers, broke; and long…last.  And a beautiful image of love, “always and always as long as the sun and the rain lasts anywhere” – isn’t that just the “better or poorer” part of the wedding vows?  And, not least, the strong, clear emotion. I liked to offer this in comparison to the lyrical lines of Yeats, “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven,” – also from a man to his beloved.

And, I always used to joke, what about that name, Mag?  Kind of like nag?  Kind of like “Maggie” in Rod Stewart’s Song: “Oh, Maggie, I wish I’d never seen your face?”

I tell them it is a love poem. But what has happened to the love? Listen, I say, to “bum on the bumpers a thousand miles away dead broke.” How does that sound?  Bam-bam-bam – that’s the sound of a man punching his wife – since he can’t express his anger, his frustration, his failure and humiliation in other ways.  Or, he becomes verbally abusive. Or he leaves his family high and dry. Because he can’t do his part to “take care of each other always and always….”.

I thought the lines were safely dated, but they ring true today about people I know.  If Wall Street greed brought everyone more jobs and more prosperity, I could understand how the wheels of capitalism must be allowed to turn freely. But it doesn’t. It brings larger gaps, more social problems, suffering and violence.  And doesn’t it damage the souls of those who accumulate wealth they can never spend in some kind of crazy gamesmanship with other rich people, while others struggle to provide beans and prunes to their children? And watch love turn to bitterness?