Poem :)

After the orange faces become wilted and droopy
And the leaves are covered in snow

We stuff our faces until we lay on the couch full and  a little loopy
Giving thanks and gratefulness to those we know

But why just this one day a year you ask?
Good point, more often then once seems like a simple task.

So give thanks to those around you on a regular basis,
Enjoy and appreciate those familiar faces!

Freebie

Sorry I forgot to post this, but the weekend of Halloween I took my free week. Thanks!

Those winter Sundays- Robert Hayden

The first time I read this poem I took it as a bitter son looking back as his youth and criticizing his father. After I reread it I took it as the complete opposite. I pictured a grown man remembering how his father went unappreciated when he was growing up. He probably was now having to face the same challenges of working and providing for a family that he had taken for granted when he was growing up. My mom always jokes about how "I'll appreciate her someday!" well this is "someday" for this guy. He realizes that he was just expecting to have his house warm and shoes shined when he woke up every morning, and didn't realize that his father was behind this with cracked and aching hands. This poem was pretty straight forward, but still very true. I'm not as blinded as this boy seems to be, but I know I do take a lot of things my parents do for me for granted, and I'm in for a surprise when I start to live on my own, just as this boy in this poem is experiencing.

The Snow Man- Wallace Stevens

        The first line of this poem Wallace makes his main point, "One must have a mind of winter," which relates to the title of the poem and is inferring that a person needs to look through the eyes of a snow man to really appreciate and find the beauty in not only winter and nature, but life as well. People usually get so caught up in life and the rush of everything they're just thinking about how their car isn't going to start, or that it's colder than what they like. By becoming "one" with nature Wallace is saying that we can appreciate all the little things like "pine-trees crusted with snow" and the "junipers shagged with ice." He points out the fact that a snowman can find these joys which are in the exact same place that we are, but we just don't stop to look.
       The last two lines of this poem are very complex and made me think: "And, nothing himself, beholds nothing that is not there and the nothing that is." After reading it out loud to myself quite a few times, it still didn't really make sense and reminded me of some 70's profound saying that nobody really understood. The most I could get out of it was that this whole poem is personifying the snowman as a real object and then brings the reader back to reality saying that since the snowman isn't real neither is the concept of humans ever understanding nature fully. But that's all i got!

A Work of Artifice- Marge Piercy

        After looking a little more into the background of Marge Piercy's life, this poem definitely made more sense. She was born in 1936 and her family went through the Great Depression. She had raised in a racially segregated neighborhood. Her Jewish grandmother took care of her, along with her mother who was imaginative and outspoken which was unusual for that time period. So she was raised among many stereotypes that were repressed and judged for their race, religion, gender, etc. She became active in civil rights, and then started writing poems about woman's rights.
         The bonsai tree in this poem represents women who are cut back and made to look pretty, instead of being able to reach a potentially huge level, even of eighty feet tall. She talks about how men have the mind set that women are lucky to have the protection that they provide, the tree having a pot to grow in, and it is expected to remain loyal to their "wifely duties", becoming domestic and weak as she puts it. The poem starts out to seemingly be just about the tree, but as it progresses she hints more and more that is about womens rights adding in words like "domestic and weak," "crippled brain," "hair in curlers," and "hands you love to touch," personifying the tree progressively more as a woman. I can definitely see how this poem would have become extremely popular at the time because women really didn't speak out, and if they did they were ignored and disrespected. Now that this isn't as much of an issue because we've come so far in increasing women's rights, this poem didn't really hit me that hard, but I still definitely liked the style and idea behind it!