I think of nymphs
And wishes
And home-sewn skirts
Of Barons
And sharp tools
And bloody torn shirts
I think of dancing
And playing
And new made-up worlds
Of yelling
And punishments
And very sad girls
It’s the kingdom of the Precious, where everyone knows
It’s the baron that rules but the nymphs still grow…
This was a poem written for my mother in my senior year of high school. Originally, it was an assignment in my English literature class in which we had weekly poetry tasks for part of it. The assignment for that week was to write in the style of a sonnet.
Firstly, I have never considered myself much of a writer–especially not a poet. But like with any subject I face, I try to mold it to my preferences in some way. While most of the kids in the class were writing about themselves or anything simple to get through the assignment, I really cared about my poems, especially since it was the first time I really tried writing them and I wanted them to be decent. So I decided to take the metaphorical route.
Many of the Chicana poets we read about, for example Lorna Dee Cervantes’s poems, address the differences of generations. In her piece, Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway, Cervantes uses the images and common experiences she, her mother, and her grandmother have lived through, as a basis. I decided to write a poem about my mother’s childhood, but her childhood was worlds different from mine, thus there was not much to relate when it came to the types of struggles we faced or the people we dealt with. Therefore, the genre of fantasy fit best since it was a way for me to at least grasp at general ideas.
So I chose nymphs because my mother’s first name (which she replaces by using her middle name) is Nympha, and it also reminded me of the playful young girls my mom and her sisters once were (as she’s told me through stories). Her father was very strict, scary, and overprotective. He was also the one to carry the last name of Preciado, meaning “precious.” So all those pieces (and probably a few more) put together resulted in this poem.