更美的世界08-我写的第一首诗

[00:00.00]My First Poem 我写的第一首诗
[00:05.73]When I was eight, I wrote my first poem.
[00:09.01]My mother read the little poem and poured out her praise.
[00:12.75]Why, this poem was nothing short of genius!
[00:15.80]This evening when my father came in,
[00:18.00]my mother began to tell him,
[00:19.51]“Ben, Buddy 1 has written his first poem!
[00:22.26]And it’s beautiful, absolutely amazing—”
[00:24.54]“If you don’t mind, I’d like to decide for myself,”
[00:27.62]Father said.
[00:28.72]I kept my face lowered to my plate as he read that poem.
[00:32.54]It was only ten lines.
[00:34.08]But it seemed to take hours.
[00:35.70]“I think it’s lousy,”
[00:37.68]he said.
[00:38.67]I couldn’t look up.
[00:40.19]My eyes were getting wet.
[00:41.72]“Ben, sometimes I don’t understand you,”
[00:44.47]my mother was saying.”
[00:46.10]This is just a little boy.
[00:47.85]These are the first lines of poetry he’s ever written.
[00:51.12]He needs encouragement.”
[00:52.44]“I don’t know why.”
[00:54.42]My father held his ground.
[00:56.04]“Isn’t there enough lousy poetry in the world already?
[00:59.34]No law says Buddy has to become a poet.”
[01:02.61]A few years later I took a second look at that first poem;
[01:06.54]it was a pretty lousy poem.
[01:08.63]After a while,
[01:10.04]I worked up the courage to show him something new,
[01:12.45]a short story.
[01:14.00]My father thought it was overwritten but not hopeless.
[01:17.49]I was learning to rewrite.
[01:19.68]And my mother was learning that she could criticize me without crushing me.
[01:23.62]You might say we were all learning.
[01:25.90]But it wasn’t until years later that the true meaning
[01:29.31]of that painful “first poem” experience dawned on me.
[01:32.14]As I became a professional writer,
[01:34.89]it became clearer and clearer to me how fortunate I had been.
[01:38.27]I had a mother who said,
[01:40.36]“Buddy, did you really write this?
[01:43.41]I think it’s wonderful!”
[01:44.73]and a father who shook his head no and drove me to tears with “I think it’s lousy.”
[01:48.44]A writer—in fact every one of us in life—
[01:51.72]needs that loving force from which all creation 2 flows.
[01:55.18]Yet alone that force is incomplete 3, even misleading;
[01:59.11]balance of the force cautions 4,
[02:01.10]“Watch. Listen. Review. Improve.”
[02:04.60]Sometimes you find these opposing forces in associate friends, loved ones.
[02:09.97]But finally you must balance these opposites within yourself.
[02:13.46]Those conflicting but complementary voices of my childhood echo 5 down through the years—
[02:19.15]wonderful…lousy…wonderful…lousy—
[02:23.08]like two opposing winds battering 6 me.
[02:25.72]I try to navigate 7 my craft so as not to capsize before either.