Cottonmouth Country

The poem “Cottonmouth Country” was kind of weird… When reading it I got this weird sense from it. I didn’t know where Hatteras was and I also wondered why the poet chose that place to put in the poem. I found that Hatteras is a place on the east coast of North Carolina and it is called the “Graveyard of the Atlantic” because of such dangerous shipping conditions there. Then the next thing I didn’t know was what a cottonmouth was? I knew that it definitely not that nasty dry feeling like a cotton ball is in a persons mouth, so I looked it up and it is actually a snake, and a kind of dangerous one at that. The cottonmouth is not the typical snake, this snake lives on the east coast, and it goes in water and even the Atlantic Ocean. From that, this place Hatteras sounds like a not very fun place at all. All the description such as fish bones, death, cottonmouth, and pollution, etc. that makes the reader feel like this isn’t a happy place. The author obviously doesn’t like it there. The last two lines bring things together a bit more, “Birth, not death, is the hard loss. I know. I also left a skin there.” From the build up of the description of Hatteras and what it is like there, with the death of many in the ocean, the snakes, the fish bones, and the pollution, this place sounds horrible and I think that is where the “birth, not death, is the hard loss” comes in. I think the author was trying to say there that being born in a crappy place is harder than dying in a crappy place. When a person is born in a place like that they usually stay there all throughout there childhood without a choice and have to kind of suffer there. Then death on the other hand, if they are dying in a place like this they must have made the decision to stay there. I kind of look at it the opposite from the poem. I look at being born there a person has no control and they just deal with it a leave when they get older, but then I look at dying there and I would think it would be harder to look back with regret that I didn’t leave a place like that? The last line reveals that the author lived there and left there… leaving only skin behind like a snake; they shed their skin as a symbol that the place is no longer a part of them, and that they are starting fresh somewhere new. Looking at the poem as a whole, I noticed that it is only one stanza and it only has eight lines, and think that it contributes to the meaning, showing that the author doesn’t see the place as something important to them and just dreary and boring. In the end, I thought the poem was kind of interesting and I liked how the author described the place where they were born in such a different way than many would have expected.