Lorin's Verses

"You've written a verse about the bread shortage," Maurice said, reading over Lorin's shoulder without asking permission, which he never did.

"I've written a verse about everything since I was twelve. The bread shortage was simply next in line."

"Most men our age have given it up. Verse-making. They say it isn't serious enough for the times."

"Most men our age have given up noticing anything the times don't specifically demand they notice. I'd rather keep noticing." Lorin folded the page and tucked it away. "Someone has to remember what the bread actually tasted like, once the histories are only interested in who marched where."

He tried, one particular week, to write something about the danger closing in around Maurice: the royalist conspiracy, the widening net, the fear Lorin carried around all day like a stone in his boot he couldn't stop to remove. He sat with the page a long time. Nothing came that didn't sound either false or unbearable, and both were failures by his own standard.

"What are you working on?" Maurice asked, finding him at it again past midnight.

"Nothing good."

"Read it anyway."

"It isn't finished."

"Read it anyway, Lorin."

He read four lines. They were clumsy, and they didn't rhyme where his verses usually insisted on rhyming, and the last line simply stopped rather than resolving into anything. Maurice was quiet for a moment after.

"That's the worst thing you've ever written," he said.

"I know."

"Don't stop writing them."

Lorin didn't stop, though none of what came in those weeks was fit to show anyone, including, mostly, Maurice himself. He wrote clumsy, unfinished lines about fear he couldn't shape into anything satisfying, and he kept every one of them anyway, in a drawer he didn't open again for months.

He understood, much later, what the bad verses had been for. Not to be good. Not even, really, to be finished. Just to give the fear somewhere to go each night besides straight into his chest, where it would otherwise have sat, unmoved and unmanageable, for as long as the danger lasted. A bad poem written at midnight, he decided, examining the whole drawer of them once the worst of the danger had finally passed, had done more actual work keeping him upright than any of his better, more polished verses had ever been asked to do.