Journal #2 “9/11 Poem Reflection”
Introduction: Poems often help us understand our emotional reaction to something because the language of emotion is not rational. The following two poems attempt to describe what loss can feel like but do so in very different ways.
Assignment: Read the following poems pieces:
1) Describe how the following poems make you feel. What specific images, symbols, or language evoke this response?
2) Try to connect the subject of the poems with your experience of 9/11 and the experience of the entire country. Think about the themes of silence and emptiness for Neruda’s work and of chaos and brokenness for Komunyakaa’s. How do these ideas fit with the specifics of the tragedy and how are they different?
Death arrives among all that sound
like a shoe with no foot in it, like a suit with no man in it,
comes and knocks, using a ring with no stone in it, with no
finger in it,
comes and shouts with no mouth, with no tongue, with no throat.
Nevertheless its steps can be heard
and its clothing makes a hushed sound, like a tree.
—Pablo Neruda, from "Nothing But Death"
After the Fall
An afternoon storm has hit
the Pearl of the Orient
& stripped nearly everybody.
Bandoliers, miniskirts, tennis shoes,
fatigue jackets, combat boots-
city colors are bruised & polyester
suits limp down side streets.
Even the ragpicker is glad
to let his Australian bush hat
with the red feather float away.
Something deeper than sadness
litters the alleys like the insides
kicked out of pillows.
The old mama-san who always
collected scraps of yellow paper,
cigarette butts, & matchsticks
through field-stripped years
hides under her cardboard box.
Cowboys park new Harleys
along Lam Son Square
& disappear with gold in their mouths.
Dzung leaves the Continental Hotel
in a newspaper dress.
Hoping for a hard rain,
she moves through the broken colors
flung to the ground,
mixing up the words to Trinh’s
“Mad Girl’s Love Song”
& “Stars Fell on Alabama,”
trying to bite off her tongue.
-Yusef Komunyakaa
Follow-up Question: Poet Laureate Billy Collins once said that all poetry is about death, what did he mean by this?