Thanksgiving Poem :)

A Not So Traditional Thanksgiving

By Ali Lind

We always shop the day before.

We then proceed to make ten more trips to the store the next day.

The doorbell never rings with a crowd of people flooding in.

Five people, four dogs, and fifteen fish are plenty.

There is no formal attire needed.

The dress code is pajama and slipper friendly.

There is no conversing in the living room.

Each room holds a family member doing their own thing.

From Facebook, to Call of Duty, to the Broncos game.

The table has no turkey figurines

or fake leaves spread around.

We have unpolished silverware and mismatching chairs.

There are no perfect pumpkin and apple pies.

There are only ones with holes in each of them,

and missing crust pieces…

From multiple sources…

We gather around the table.

No hands are joined together and no heads down.

We dig in and slip bits to the dogs,

and we giggle while saying what we are thankful for.

There is no family walk to the park.

Just bellies full of tryptophan ready for a nap and watching movies together…

It is our not so traditional, yet Perfect Turkey Day.

A Work of Artifice

“A Work of Artifice” was a simple poem, but it had a lot of great meaning behind it. It took nature, a bonsai tree to be exact and compared it to how women were restrained, and they never got to reach their full potential back in the day. Since looking at the poem and knowing what it meant pretty easily I decided to look at the title and I didn’t quite understand what it meant. The word that stood out was “Artifice”. I looked it up and found that it meant trickery or skillful and either could make sense in this context. A work of trickery could easily be what males do to women, they trick them into thinking that all women need to do is grow up and tend to every command from a male. When in that, a women feels that that is all there is for her to do and especially when all the males around do the same; it is one big trick. Also, skillful would work because a work of skillfulness or skill makes sense because like the bonsai tree analogy trimming it and taking care of a tree like that is a skill and the same goes for these women who have been designed by men to cater to their every need. They have been pruned and trimmed to the perfect little women that the man wants with perfect skill. The bonsai tree analogy just goes perfect with this because of how a tree with so much potential to be big and strong and hold its own is pruned and kept very small, weak and is easily tipped over… just like a women when she is with a man unwilling to let her potential grow. A woman is just that tiny bonsai tree, and the man, a gardener with those unforgiving pruners. A tree needs not a little pot, but wide open land to spread its roots and let its branches extent out reaching to the sky and grow… that is the real kind of lucky tree.

Vergissmeinnicht

How I chose this week's poem was by the title. It really caught my eye and I wanted to know what it meant and what it had to do with the poem. It looked foreign to me, maybe German? Then I looked a little into the poem and saw that it was about a soldier and I thought wow maybe I was right? I looked it up and found that I was in fact right that the title was German and I also found out that it means “forget me not.” Once I found that out it all started to make sense with the whole war theme. After reading through the poem I could tell that there was a very emotional tone and lets just say it was not a happy tone… it was sad like it was still a fresh wound. The poem says “three weeks gone” making it seem like it was just yesterday to the soldier, and he was on the battle grounds where he killed a German soldier. He finds where his body lies, and describes the scene in such detail and it isn’t pretty; the soldier really shows the brutality of war. He looks at the dead soldier in such a disrespectful tone until he finds the picture of the soldier’s lover. In the third stanza he starts talking about the picture of the soldier’s lover Steffi. Then there is a break and the next stanza is different, he starts the new stanza with we, which is weird maybe it is that the soldier will always be attached to the soldier as his killer, but he will also be attached to the soldier’s lover through that brutality of war. So maybe putting the title “forget me not” can relate to the brutality of war in the fact that many who have loved ones in war fret that they will be forgotten, but once that soldier dies they are the ones who are never forgotten… by there lover and their killers. “And death who had the soldier singled has done the lover mortal hurt,” is the last line of the poem and it shows that there will be mutual remembrance for that soldier.

For the Sleepwalkers

For the Sleepwalkers was a very cool poem that is full of great description. Each time Hirsch described what the sleepwalkers see, feel, touch; the reader feels like they are actually there, as a sleepwalker also. ­One of the main ideas in this poem is the idea of taking a leap of faith I believe. The first stanza is what makes me believe that is what Hirsch is trying to say, “Tonight I want to say something wonderful for the sleepwalkers who have so much faith in their legs, so much faith in the invisible.” When taking a leap of faith one doesn’t always know what they are getting into, but the only thing they can do is trust that their legs are strong enough to hold them up even if it doesn’t all workout. In the second stanza, the poet talks about ways of getting out into the darkness, the world of the sleepwalkers. He talks about the window and the seamless mirror and then the sleepwalker chooses the door, and that seems to show that everyone when talking their own leap of faith needs to choose their own way to the place they want to go. Also, the thing about a door that is different from a window or a mirror is a door somewhat represents something more of a challenge, because he uses the word gaping when he describes the door. When I think of a person who sat and gape I think of a person sitting in wonder, and that’s what I think the door represents; a whole new wonder waiting to be explored by the sleep walker. The last line I want to discuss is the line that stood out to me the most. “That’s why I want to say something astonishing like: Our hearts are leaving our bodies.” To me this describes the purpose of the sleepwalker. They take that leap of faith and then let their heart do what it has always wanted to do in the darkness that they never could do in the light. In the darkness the sleepwalkers’ heart is free to do what it has always wanted to do; it is their other life, the one they have always wanted to live. A sleepwalker is the part of a person who had the courage to take that leap of faith… to the ultimate dream.