Halloween

I took my niece out trick-or-treating!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Even If You Weren't My Father

Even If You Weren't My Father By Camillo Sbarbaro

Father, even if you weren't my father,
were you an utter stranger,
for your own self I'd love you.
Remembering how you saw, one winter morning,
the first violet on the wall across the way,
and with what joy you shared the revelation;
then, hoisting the ladder to your shoulder,
out you went and propped it to the wall.
We, your children, stood watching at the window.


And I remember how, another time,
you chased my little sister through the house
(pigheadedly, she'd done I know not what).
But when she, run to earth, shrieked out in fear,
your heart misgave you,
for you saw yourself hunt down your helpless child.
Relenting then, you took her in your arms
in all her terror: Caressing her, enclosed in your
embrace as in some shelter from the brute
who'd, one moment since, yourself.

Father, even were you not my father,
were you some utter stranger,
for your innocence, your artless tender heart,
I would love above all other men
so love you.

When I read this poem I thought of my father because he has these qualities that make a loving person and father.
" And I remember how, another time,
you chased my little sister through the house
(pigheadedly,she'd done I know not what.)
But when she, run to earth, shrieked out in fear,
your heart misgave you,
for you saw yourself hunt down your helpless child.
Relenting then, you took her in your arms
in all her terror: Caressing her, enclosed in your
embrace as in some shelterfrom that brute
who'd, one moment since, yourself."
This shows a qualtiy of a good man and father. The author show this because even if this man wasn't he would still love him because of the person he is. What I got from this poem is that even if he is not your father but as good qualities that you would love him just the same.

Unveiling

Unveiling by Linda Pastan


In the cemetery
a mile away
from where we used to live
my aunts and mother,
my father and uncles lie
in two long rows almost the way
they used to sit around
the long planked table
at family dinners.
And walkng beside
the graves today, down
one straight path
and up the next,
I don't feel sad
for them, just left out a bit
as if they kept
from me the kind
of grown-up secret
they used to share
back then, something
I'm not quite ready yet
to learn.


I like this poem. So the author starts off by talking of walking throught the cemetery and just looking at the graves. Then after looking at the graves the author realizes that she does not feel sorry for her family but instead she feels left out like when she was young and they were talking about grown-up stuff, things that she was not ready to learn yet. So I think that it is not her time to die just like when she was little and it was not her time to learn about some things that adults in her family were talking about. She might feel left out but she knows that it is not her turn so she has to wait. I also thought of how when someone grows up they learn things through experience and and through experience we are more ready to die and leave everything behinds us.

1943

1943 By Donald Hall

They toughened us for war. In the high-school auditorium
Ed Monahan knocked out Dominick Esposito in the first round

of the heavyweight finals, and ten months later Dom died
in the third wave at Tarawa. Every morning of the war

our Brock-Hall Dairy delivered milk from horse-drawn wagons
to wooden back porches in southern Connecticut. In winter,

frozen cream lifted the cardboard lids of glass bottles,
Grade A or Grade B, while marines bled to death in the surf,

or the right engine faltered into the Channel silt, or troops marched
-what could we do?-with frostbitten feet as white as milk.

What I got from this poem is so they were fighting during high-school and then tens months later they died in war. People back in America were living their lives like nothing was happening at all for they couldn't do anything about it.

"frozen cream lifted the cardboard lids of glass bottles,
Grade A or Grade B, while marines bled to death in the surf,

or the right engine faltered into the Channel Silt, or troops marched
-what could we do?-with frostbitten feet as white as milk."

So here he describes frozen cream lifts lids and while this is happened soldiers marched to death. Then he asks a question "what could we do?-with frostbitten feet as white as milk." Maybe he is referring back to the frozen cream and that cream can't if it is not unfrozen.

So I think that this poem is saying that even if young boys are dying we have to go with our lives because no matter what we do we can't save them.

Beginning Again

Beginning Again By Franz Wright

"If I could stop talking, completely
cease talking for a year, I might begin
to get well," he muttered.
Off alone again performing
brain surgery on himself
in a small badly lit
room with no mirror. A room
whose floor ceiling and walls
are all mirror, what a mess
oh my God-

And still
it stands,
the question
not how begin
again, but rather

Why?

So we sit there
together
the mountain
and me, Li Po
said, until only the mountain
remains.

After this I thought of someone who is trying to become a better person.
"If I could stop talking, completely
cease talking for a year, I might begin
to get well," he muttered."
So when I read this I thought of how when I say something stupid and only if I had thought about it maybe I wouldn't have said something mean. I also thought of just thinking helps solve certain things.
"Off alone again performing
brain surgery on himself
in a small badly lit
room with no mirror."
So this made me think of how can you fix a problem without seeing it. First to need to realize the problem before you can start fixing it.
"So we sit there
together
the mountain
and me, Li Po
said, until only the mountain remains."
So during our class discussion I was have trouble understanding what this part meant then Dustin said something really interesting. So mountains are formed by two plates colliding and so maybe the author is talking of a man who faces and collides with his problems until only the "mountain" remains. I found this very interesting.