[Yves S L]

Here is another angle: what concrete situations within what family dynamics creates a drama over what period of time given what personality to create a N talking like this? For the poem to make sense the reader will have to somehow extrapolate/interpolate that information. Forget for a moment what academic associative games with Christian theology or whatnot are being played, but focus on the living realities of families, and consider the following passage:

Of course they're cursed.
Through them, you're vulnerable. For them to thrive,
you must be sapped, and what is yours, disbursed
to fund their journey, so they may arrive.

It reads to me like a spectacularly syntactically ornate gripe! Sure, one takes what persona the poet wants to present at face value, as an opening gambit one accepts, and that includes the speech patterns of the N, but my main feeling is this syntax is the result of having to get the rhymes at the end of the lines.

[Susan McLean]

Yves, I have posted another revision that tries to make the syntax clearer and less convoluted. You don't care for the tone, but it doesn't sound like therapy or complaint to me, just the kind of argument a sonnet often makes. I'm not a parent myself, so the poem is trying to imagine what the parent/firstborn conflict looks like from the point of view of a parent. Like any imaginative effort, it may fall short of the reality.

Susan

[Alex Pepple]

Hello, Susan,

I like your clearer, less convoluted syntax in response to Yves’s take. Still, I think it could be even clearer. So, here are some potential reworkings toward a more relaxed, conversational tone:

You focus on them fixedly, the first
part of you that’s gone yet stays alive,
the way your hand might crawl and cry and thirst,
relying on your care just to survive,

for more direct and smoother phrasing.

though outside your control. Maybe you’re cursed,

If you are the one troubled by their actions, then it's arguably you who might be cursed.

subjected to their whims. For them to thrive,
in sacrifice you save, get funds disbursed
to smooth their way, ensuring they'll arrive.

This version is more direct and active, using phrasing like “in sacrifice” rather than (the tellier) “you sacrifice,” and “get funds disbursed” to preserve concision and clarity.

The firstborn is the most restrained by friction
between the parents’ pride, control, and loss:
sometimes rebellious, sometimes in the wrong,
opting for choices breeding your affliction,
they stumble through to where they can belong:
they’re front-page news or they’re nailed to a cross.

Here, too, I’d suggest toning down the absolutes—e.g., “always” to “sometimes”—for greater realism and balance, and leaning more toward showing and metaphor than telling.

Good luck with the sonnet, Susan. I hope you find something helpful here!

Cheers,
...Alex

[Hilary Biehl]

I think the second revision is a significant improvement, but I still think that one sentence could be broken up and/or smoothed and made less redundant. Maybe something like,

"For them to thrive,
you sacrifice and save, your funds disbursed
to smooth their way. You trust they will arrive."

That would also foreshadow the ending a bit, hopefully without giving too much away.

I'm a parent as well as an oldest child. The tensions created (for both parent and child) by the simultaneous dependence and independence of the child are very real. I didn't relate as much to the line "When every choice of theirs is your affliction," but I recognize that that is also a real dynamic for some families. It's an incredibly sad poem, I think.

[Susan McLean]

Alex, your suggestions have led me to make several changes, toning down some of the absolutes. But some of the absolutes are there to make a point about how parental pressures can make the firstborn feel that they are always in the wrong. I did mean that the firstborn are "cursed," partly as a nod to the plague on the firstborn in Egypt, which was sent not because the offspring had done anything wrong, but as a way of striking at the parents and at the Pharoah himself. Francis Bacon said "He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune," meaning that to care for anyone makes one vulnerable to grief on their account.

Hilary, I partly took your suggestion for L8. In L12, I also tried to make it sound more conditional than certain. Parent-offspring conflict is inevitable. But some cases are worse than others.

Susan