My favourite poem that I've written

It's a question I am often asked, when I visit schools and elsewhere: what is my favourite poem that I've written? When it comes to my writing for children, I often reply that it is my piece 'I Don't Like Poetry', the poem for which I am probably best known. However, the poem that is closest to my heart may be one that was not written for children. The poem is called 'Here We All Are', and you can read it HERE. When I wrote this poem I wanted to aim high in terms of publication, so I sent it out to all the fancy journals, all of whom rejected it. All, that is, except one: I was delighted when the poem found a home in Poetry Wales, where it was published in November 2023. The poem touches deeply on my Welsh ancestry, so this was probably my first choice home for it in any case. 

Why is this poem so special to me? It's really hard to say. The poem tackles aspects of family history that lie deeply buried within my family's and my community's collective psyche. In Seamus Heaney's famous poem 'Digging', he states that, since he is not suited to digging with a spade, he will take his pen "and dig with it." 'Here We All Are' is probably the poem in which it feels like I am digging deepest.

When I was a teenager, I had Larkin's 'This Be the Verse' taped up on my bedroom wall. Being the cynical, sardonic little smartarse that I was, this poem spoke to me deeply - "They F you up, your mum and dad" - damn straight they do! The subsequent verses, about man "hand[ing] on mysery to man", which then "deepen[s] like a coastal shelf", gave my teenage mind the permission to impute my supposed failings (of which I perceived there to be many) onto something else, namely the generations before me.

As I've grown up, I feel I have lost the misanthropy that led me to put Larkin's poem on my wall. But I have maintained an interest in psychoanalysis, in particular the concept of intergeneration trauma, as discussed by Peter Fonagy and others. 'Here We All Are' does not have Larkin's curmudgeonliness, but it retains a kind of psychoanalytically-informed unease at the state of the human condition. 

Sorry. I know that last sentence sounds very pretentious. To put it bluntly: I think 'Here We All Are', perhaps more than any other poem I've written, says what it wants to say. I try to say the truth; I try to say it succinctly, withour pretention, and in a way that does it justice. I'm not saying I think it is an amazing poem; I'm just saying that I think it does most of what I want it to do, which is to tell the truth about family history, and the reality of what it means to have an ancestry in the first place. 

the edition of Poetry Wales in which my poem is published

Isn't It Weird

to think that everyone

was once a baby?

I was once a baby, and so were you.

Your parents – they were once babies too.

Even your Great Aunt Beryl,

with her hairy chin and shrivelled skin like a prune,

she was once a baby.

Maybe not a very attractive baby,

but a baby nonetheless.

Your teachers?

Your teachers were once babies.

Every single one of them.

And that teaching assistant

who seems about a million years old,

she was once – you guessed it – a baby.

She may even have been

a very cute, squishy baby.

And also your…

you know what, it doesn’t matter!

whoever you think of –

they were once a baby.

A teeny, tiny little baby.

Isn’t that weird?

Joshua Seigal