The first poem that we watched the person speak it, then we read it, and lastly we analyzed was “homage of my hips”. A lady named Lucille Clifton wrote this poem and she in the start of video seems to love the way she is. She is not a your typical women. She is a woman that embraces her size, her hair, and her hips. The poem talks about she loves her hips and embraces it. Now you may be wondering Why hips? I think she chose to do hips because in our society today our hips are a big part of us. She says her hips are free hips many times and they are not held back. She means by this is that she will embrace her hips to the world and not care because as she says “put a spell on a man and spin him like a top!” I find it amazing how she does not feel self-cautious about her body and just embrace it to the world without caring what people think. In the start of her video she says, “I celebrate my wonderfulness.” She appreciates herself. Another thing that stood out to me is how you first can love yourself and then you can love others. This is important because the first step in love I believe is to love yourself and then you have the ability to love others. This poem is a poem that is about love, but it is a poem about loving yourself.
“Hanging Fire” is a poem by Aubre Lorde and it is about how fourteen year-old girls are very insecure about herself and are not capable of loving yourself while her mother not being their to help. Being fourteen is a tough age. You are always stressing about things. Now not all girls stress about these things but many do, boys, our skin betraying us, dances, parties, and having better grades then somebody even though they chose them because they like that person better. One though in the poem was something I did not understand which was the death part and what if she dies. For me being fourteen I do not think of death and it happening to me before graduation and what people will say. I just wake up and wait for what the day has held for me. Another thing I struggled with understanding is why she cannot go into her mother’s room with the door closed. I thought couldn’t she just knock. But then as a class we discussed it. We came up with that maybe her mother does not want to talk about it cause fourteen maybe was a struggle for her. The other thing that I just came up with is that what if this fourteen year-old girl feels that the door is closed because her mom cannot help her.
The last poem I will be talking about is “My Mother’s Closet” by Kate Buckley. This is a poem that I believe a young girl losing somebody she loves and wants closure but from what? I have two very different perspectives of this poem. The first one is the mother may have died and she wants to know how. So she has to then go through all her things and see what happens. The other one is that the mother ran away from her old life and wanted a new life and started fresh by leaving everything. For me it is sad to know she has lost a person that has probably had a huge impact on her life.
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