God Says Yes To Me by Kaylin Haught

I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic
and she said yes
I asked her if it was okay to be short
and she said it sure is
I asked her if I could wear nail polish
or not wear nail polish
and she said honey
she calls me that sometimes
she said you can do just exactly
what you want to
Thanks God I said
And is it even okay if I don't paragraph
my letters
Sweetcakes God said
who knows where she picked that up
what I'm telling you is
Yes Yes Yes
_____________________________

Reaction: I was surprise since "God" seems to be a female in this poem and that was really the only thing that stood out.

Meaning: As for the meaning. I got two. The first is that "God" is actually the child's mother or she sees her mother as God because parents usually control lives of their children until they get older. Another one that I thought is that "God" was actually a female God and the child in the poem was praying as if asking for guidance. Either way, her answer is always "yes, yes, yes" meaning that she has control over her life and no one else.

Technique: free verse

White-Eyes by Mary Oliver

In winter
all the singing is in
the tops of the trees
where the wind-bird

with its white eyes
shoves and pushes
among the branches.
Like any of us

he wants to go to sleep,
but he's restless—
he has an idea,
and slowly it unfolds

from under his beating wings
as long as he stays awake
But his big, round music, after all,
is too breathy to last.

So, it's over.
In the pine-crown
he makes his nest,
he's done all he can.

I don't know the name of this bird,
I only imagine his glittering beak
tucked in a white wing
while the clouds—

which he has summoned
from the north—
which he has taught
to be mild, and silent—

thicken, and begin to fall
into the world below
like stars, or the feathers
of some unimaginable bird

that loves us,
that is asleep now, and silent—
that has turned itself
into snow.
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Reaction: Not surprise because by the title it seemed as if the author was going to connect the poem to some sort of nature or natural event.

Meaning: I interpret the bird in the story to be a spirit of the Goddess of Earth (but that is base on my religion) and how she is always watching over the Earth and its animals and the humans. I also believe that the poem is talking about the beginning of how earth was created.

Technique: free verse

Hate Poem by Julie Sheehan

I hate you truly. Truly I do.
Everything about me hates everything about you.
The flick of my wrist hates you.
The way I hold my pencil hates you.
The sound made by my tiniest bones were they trapped
in the jaws of a moray eel hates you.
Each corpuscle singing in its capillary hates you.

Look out! Fore! I hate you.

The blue-green jewel of sock lint I’m digging
from under by third toenail, left foot, hates you.
The history of this keychain hates you.
My sigh in the background as you explain relational databases
hates you.
The goldfish of my genius hates you.
My aorta hates you. Also my ancestors.

A closed window is both a closed window and an obvious
symbol of how I hate you.

My voice curt as a hairshirt: hate.
My hesitation when you invite me for a drive: hate.
My pleasant “good morning”: hate.
You know how when I’m sleepy I nuzzle my head
under your arm? Hate.
The whites of my target-eyes articulate hate. My wit
practices it.
My breasts relaxing in their holster from morning
to night hate you.
Layers of hate, a parfait.
Hours after our latest row, brandishing the sharp glee of hate,
I dissect you cell by cell, so that I might hate each one
individually and at leisure.
My lungs, duplicitous twins, expand with the utter validity
of my hate, which can never have enough of you,
Breathlessly, like two idealists in a broken submarine.
______________________________________

Reaction: Not surprising, I was expecting this

Meaning: The author is making a list that she hates and used it to describe how much poetry she hates, despite writing it. She may targeting people who hate poetry and was able to make a list of other things that people can hate so the reader can relate.

Technique: free verse

The Summer Day by Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
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Reaction: Surprising once I got to the end. Other then that, just trying to go with the flow of the poem

Meaning: The person is questioning the world. Why we are here and who created the grasshopper. The author wants us to stop what we are doing and take time to sit back and wonder about our lives and the other lives, weather they are human or not. I believe the author really wants us to question what God (or in my case the Gods) has in mind for us and the other creatures he created on earth. The grasshopper can represents one's life, maybe even the readers life. The author is also reminding us that everything on earth will die eventually and that since we only have one life, what do we plan to do with it.

Technique: free verse

This Moment by Eavan Boland

A neighbourhood.
At dusk.

Things are getting ready
to happen
out of sight.

Stars and moths.
And rinds slanting around fruit.

But not yet.

One tree is black.
One window is yellow as butter.

A woman leans down to catch a child
who has run into her arms
this moment.

Stars rise.
Moths flutter.
Apples sweeten in the dark.
_________________________________

Reaction: Open minded and thinking and trying to go along with the poem

Meaning: I believe this poem is trying to teach us to cherish every moment of our lives. Because every moment is important and it will only happen this way once.

Techniques: free verse

The Dead by Susan Mitchell

At night the dead come down to the river to drink.
They unburden themselves of their fears,
their worries for us. They take out the old photographs.
They pat the lines in our hands and tell our futures,
which are cracked and yellow.
Some dead find their way to our houses.
They go up to the attics.
They read the letters they sent us, insatiable
for signs of their love.
They tell each other stories.
They make so much noise
they wake us
as they did when we were children and they stayed up
drinking all night in the kitchen.
_______________________________________

Reaction: I was very excited when I saw the title and read it, with an open mind. I enjoyed reading it.

Meaning: The dead may be a poem describing what happens after death. That weather it's a love one or not they are always there. We just don't know it, but they continue doing what they do and we continue doing what we do. The author may believe that death is the same as life. There is no heaven and there is no hell. After life is eternal life called death.

Techniques: free verse

The End and the Beginning by Wislawa Szymborska

After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won't
straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble
to the side of the road,
so the corpse-filled wagons
can pass.

Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.

Someone has to drag in a girder
to prop up a wall,
Someone has to glaze a window,
rehang a door.

Photogenic it's not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left
for another war.

We'll need the bridges back,
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up.

Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls the way it was.
Someone else listens
and nods with unsevered head.
But already there are those nearby
starting to mill about
who will find it dull.

From out of the bushes
sometimes someone still unearths
rusted-out arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.

Those who knew
what was going on here
must make way for
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass that has overgrown
causes and effects,
someone must be stretched out
blade of grass in his mouth
gazing at the clouds.
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Reaction: Surprising and the last two stanzas surprised me even more and the ending left me confused.

Meaning: I believe the end of the war has to do with ourselves and how we fight for something. For example, students every year will have (most likely) at least one teacher they hate. They may view that current class as a "war zone". When the school year ends, so does the war. But during the summer, that student has time to celebrate but also needs time to pick up pieces before September comes. Then when the new school year comes, the student may have a very good teacher or another bad teacher. So I believe, depending what we consider a "war zone" we have to be taught that someday it will end, but we will always have to clean it up.

Techniques: free verse

It Took All My Energy by Tony Wallace

It took all my energy to want you
and the rest of me to go after you
and then one day I knew
that I had you.
I was standing at the sink rinsing dust
from a bunch of grapes.
All my energy had been spent
pursuing you and then I had you
and then
I sat down at the kitchen table and ate the grapes.
The day was hot, that day
when I knew I had you. The man
in the house across the street
was cursing his wife.
An hour later I went to see about a job,
and the woman behind the desk
with her gold spectacles
caused me to remember that I had you.
Outside the sky was blue as a china plate.
There is nothing to do
on a day like that
but go to the beach. I caught three fish,
black and heavy as paperweights.
After the third I stopped to clean them in the ribboning surf,
three black fish flecked gold as the capes
of Egyptian kings,
strong swimmers, broad across the backs.
I slit the bellies, tossed the guts and roe
to the waiting gulls, cut the heads off slant
and lay them one by one on the gurgling sand
while I thought of you. Three small boys
picked them up
and carried them away,
holding them aloft as if on pikes.
Even as I fry these fish I think of
their heads against the sky
while the birds worked on a patch of sea
on the lee side of a sand bar that split the water
like the broken spine of a ship,
and as I turn these fish in the pan
I think of the day when I knew I had you,
and then the next, and then the day after that.
____________________________________________

Reaction: At first I thought this was a kind and sweet poem.

Meaning: I think that by the sound and flow of the poem, the author is a guy (Tony can be a guy or a girl's name) and that the author is presenting this to a love one, most likely his wife. By the sound of it, it seems like the character in the poem does all his daily things but everything makes him think about that one person (I'm still guessing his wife) and then at the end of the day when he thinks about the fish's heads in the sky, he remembers when he "had you", meaning that his wife probably died just as the fish did.

Technique: free verse

The Forgotten Planet

The Last Wolf

Tuesday 9:00am

Forgotten Planet by Doug Dorph

I ask my daughter to name the planets.
"Venus ...Mars ...and Plunis!" she says.
When I was six or seven my father
woke me in the middle of the night.
We went down to the playground and lay
on our backs on the concrete looking up
for the meteors the tv said would shower.

I don't remember any meteors. I remember
my back pressed to the planet Earth,
my father's bulk like gravity next to me,
the occasional rumble from his throat,
the apartment buildings dark-windowed,
the sky close enough to poke with my finger.

Now, knowledge erodes wonder.
The niggling voce reminds me that the sun
does shine on the dark side of the moon.
My daughter's ignorance is my bliss.
Through her eyes I spy like a voyeur.

I travel in a rocket ship to the planet Plunis.
On Plunis I no longer long for the past.
On Plunis there are actual surprises.
On Plunis I am happy.

_____________________________

1. Reaction: The last two stanzas surprised me and had to re-read it to understand it's meaning. The last part threw me off.

2. Meaning: The forgotten planet is Pluto and today Pluto is no longer a planet. But the author is recalling a memory from his past and he's realizing that knowledge is changing from the time he was a boy. But I think the poem is just him remembering his past and comparing his memories to what his daughter is learning. She called Pluto Plunis because it's no longer a planet, so it's not important and the new generation is starting to forget its name.

3. Technique: free write

The Last Wolf by Mary TallMountain

The last wolf hurried toward me
through the ruined city
and I heard his baying echoes
down the steep smashed warrens
of Montgomery Street and past
the ruby-crowned highrises
left standing
their lighted elevators useless

Passing the flicking red and green
of traffic signals
baying his way eastward
in the mystery of his wild loping gait
closer the sounds in the deadly night
through clutter and rubble of quiet blocks
I hear his voice ascending the hill
and at last his low whine as he came
floor by empty floor to the room
where I sat
in my narrow bed looking west, waiting
I heard him snuffle at the door and
I watched

He trotted across the floor
he laid his long gray muzzle
on the spare white spread
and his eyes burned yellow
his small dotted eyebrows quivered

Yes, I said.
I know what they have done.

_________________________

1. Reaction: By the time I finished the poem I was in shock because I can understand the wolf's pain.

2. Meaning: I think the wolf represents someone spirits. The wolf represents the spirit's sorrow and how it feels sad and lonely and it's in pain. The wolf is looking for someone for help or for someone to understand its pain. The person at the end is the one person who tells the wolf "Yes I said. I know what they have done," meaning that "Yes. I understand your pain,"

3. Technique: free write

Tuesday 9:00am (Poem) by Denver Butson

A man standing at the bus stop
reading the newspaper is on fire
Flames are peeking out
from beneath his collar and cuffs
His shoes have begun to melt

The woman next to him
wants to mention it to him
that he is burning
but she is drowning
Water is everywhere
in her mouth and ears
in her eyes
A stream of water runs
steadily from her blouse

Another woman stands at the bus stop
freezing to death
She tries to stand near the man
who is on fire
to try to melt the icicles
that have formed on her eyelashes
and on her nostrils
to stop her teeth long enough
from chattering to say something
to the woman who is drowning
but the woman who is freezing to death
has trouble moving
with blocks of ice on her feet

It takes the three some time
to board the bus
what with the flames
and water and ice
But when they finally climb the stairs
and take their seats
the driver doesn't even notice
that none of them has paid
because he is tortured
by visions and is wondering
if the man who got off at the last stop
was really being mauled to death
by wild dogs.

Tuesday 9:00am

Reaction: After reading this poem, I was very confuse and didn't understand it.

Meaning: I thought that the poem was trying to teach us how to help others and how it's important, but how difficult it is to help a stranger.

Technique: Free verse, metaphors,