This is my poem response for exercise #6.
Ashes, Ashes
Ring around the rosy
A pocketful of posies
Ashes, ashes
We all fall down
I arrive at school and greet the other young kids
We are in kindergarten.
Ignorant bliss.
Commotion at school, but not because of school.
Planes, hijackers, twin towers.
These words swirl around the room, closing us in.
When I get home, the image of a collapsing building burns in my mind.
Ash fills the TV screen.
Ring around the rosy
A pocketful of posies
Ashes, ashes
We all fall down.
Explanation:
In this poem, I wrote about 9/11 and how I remember it as a child in kindergarten. At the time, I didn't fully understand what had happened, but I certainly felt that something was wrong that day. I included the "Ring Around the Rosy" nursery rhyme because it has a double meaning in the two different spots I included it. The first emphasizes my age and how I am a kid. The second symbolizes the twin towers and how they fell down and there were ashes from the buildings. In this way, I tried to draw a parallel from my life to the incident.
Weird! One of my poems was titled ashes but mine was about the holocaust. I agree when 9/11 happened we were all only in Kindergarten and had no idea what was happening. When it happened we didn't realize how big of a deal it was.
ReplyDeleteI as well wrote about 9/11 and remember the day fairly well. I really like your use of the children's poem at the beginning and end of the poem relating how something so innocent can relate to such a terrible tragedy.
ReplyDeleteThis was a haunting poem. How you paralleled Ring Around the Rosie, which is about the black death which a great tragedy of a different time, with 9/11 a tragedy of our time was really ingenious. How you started with Ring Around the Rosie and ended with it was really powerful. I will now never look at that song again. Also, your free flowing poetry in the middle stanza was really superb. The imagery you added to it and the addition of how you felt even as a child left a impression on me.
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