The Warrior: A Mother's Story of a Son at War

Poetry paves the pathway into the heart's best-kept secrets. Frances Richey, a poet and mother --- and, in her own way, a warrior --- has chosen to tell us about herself and her warrior son through the medium of her poems. Ben is fighting in Iraq. She struggles at home with feelings and ideas that are at war with the reality of their shared situation. In her lament "E-mail from a Secret Location in Iraq: Re: the Puppies," Richey recalls: When my son was small, I set boundaries: first the yard, Then our street, our block. Later, lost On a back road in Virginia, I let him take the wheel, dark But for the car's high beams, A few stars. He told me, I want to be a soldier. I thought he'd change his mind..... Richey's innermost gatherings include us in the sense of a mother's pain as she poses a question in the same poem: Will he come back? Ben dedicated himself to war, graduating from West Point as a Green Beret. His whole young life pointed toward the possibility of doing battle with an unnamed enemy. He is neither hesitant nor afraid. His mother is. By his actions and with his life, he supports the idea of war and the justification of this war, while his mother cannot. So they live, apart, but not alienated. There are plenty of opportunities for dialogue, maybe more when he is over there than when he was at home. Until the day she learns: He's incommunicado. She's been instructed to stop sending packages and letters. He's leapt into the ether, where all things go that vanish. Nowhere and everywhere, a mountain cave, the Tigris --Love you-- on her mind, in her heart..... Just as Ben is no ordinary soldier, but part of an elite force, Frances is no ordinary mother. She dropped out of corporate America to find a more meaningful life, and through working in a hospice, she became conscious of her poetic talents. Poetry was the method she chose to give meaning to her life after Ben, whom she had raised as a single parent from the time he was two, left for college. Poetry became the voice she used to reach out to Ben and inward to her often ambivalent feelings about Ben's choice to join the military. Every parent wants her child to believe she is proud of his accomplishments. Richey desires that. But she doesn't support the war in Iraq. In "Home on Leave" she realizes, perplexed: He has another life Where he stuffs a plug of tobacco Inside his cheek, straps a knife To his thigh, searches The homes of strangers, alert To anything that moves. In that life He knows the difference between Killing and murder; that even Though the children are frightened, He must keep his helmet on. Richey grew up in West Virginia coal country, a region where hardship is a known quantity. Her poetry reflects her inner testing, her struggles to stay strong and wait. Her earlier poetry collection, THE BURNING POINT, won the White Pine Press Poetry Prize in 2004. On her website, www.FrancesRichey.com, Richey wrote these musings about the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War:

These poems are so "readable"- and speak to the heart of anyone who has been separated from a loved one for any amount of time, with the added dimension of the dangers and inevitable changes her son faced. Ms. Richey has expressed in everyday language and emotion what she went through and allows us in to feel the experience with her. Very powerful, very personal.

They're truthful, and they express what was really happening for me at home imagining what might be happening for him over there, and it was an observation of what we were going through but from a very deep place inside me." That was Frances Richey's voice on NPR a couple of months ago. She read a few lines from "One Week Before Deployment", and the cadences, the substance, the emotion, all caught my imagination. I've been reading these poems to myself and aloud for the past month, ever since the collection arrived here. The cadences are just as strong in my voice as they were in Richey's. The stories she tells are powerful and compelling. Most of all, she expresses her love for her son and her helplessness at being unable to help him while he was in danger. I found these poems deeply moving. Richey said during the show that writing these poems changed her life. I understand why they did. Wonderful stuff, even if you don't like poetry. Robert C. Ross 2008