Alexander+Ringgold+Poetry+Page

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 Let's get something clear: I am a horrible poet. I love telling stories and being descriptive but I can't write poetry to save my life. On the other hand I am quite good at finding rhymes, but that's about it. When I write poetry I try to make it as entertaining as possible, so if I'm given a prompt I try to bend it to my will, for example, our odes. I did my Ode to Videogames because I knew I would enjoy writing and rhyming about videogames. There's another thing I do to make my poetry adventures fun, and that's make it funny for my little brother, because if I have to make it enjoyable for atleast one person, and why not the gut I can relate to most? These are usually my inspirations when writing poetry which helps me get by in poetry assignments. ======

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 Even so, with my horrible poetry skills, like all poets, I must have a them to my poems? I kind of do. I like to make stories with twist at the end, maybe it be funny, sad, or scary but I love making stories with a twist, because it can engage a reader or even make them give your poem more than one read through. I like writing, not even so horror, but bloody poems about murders and things, but that just ties in with my personality of being a ted bit off my rocker. ======

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 I enjoy writing poetry as much as the next guy but I might want to consider getting better. One of my problems would be consistency, either I make a line completely unlike the other line, or I start sounding like Shakespeare one moment and then me another. So then my poems sound dumb and uninteresting. Nevertheless it's not a problem that can't be fixed and maybe I'll better myself for future poem. ======

= Sharon Olds =

We decided to have the abortion, became killers together. The period that came changed nothing. They were dead, that young couple who had been for life. As we talked of it in bed, the crash was not a surprise. We went to the window, looked at the crushed cars and the gleaming curved shears of glass as if we had done it. Cops pulled the bodies out Bloody as births from the small, smoking aperture of the door, laid them on the hill, covered them with blankets that soaked through. Blood began to pour down my legs into my slippers. I stood where I was until they shot the bound form into the black hole of the ambulance and stood the other one up, a bandage covering its head, stained where the eyes had been. The next morning I had to kneel an hour on that floor, to clean up my blood, rubbing with wet cloths at those glittering translucent spots, as one has to soak a long time to deglaze the pan when the feast is over. ==== In the poem "__The End__", by Sharon Olds, it starts out how a young couple went to get an abortion and how they discussed it in their bed when another couple crashed in their vehicle out side. Sharon Olds is known for writing poetry from the perspective of women and their everyday life, so it's no surprise her poem is about the days after a woman after her abortion and how she felt. Olds wanted to display a scene where a couple reflects on how they became murders together when they went along with the abortion. When the woman sees the bodies being removed from the car she says, “Cops pulled the bodies out Bloody as births from the small, smoking aperture of the door…” it reminds the woman of her earlier abortion and how the concept of a baby being born usually results in someone dying didn’t play out in this scenario. She had killed her child and someone had died, as if death was surrounding her as a punishment for her act. ====   Three months after he lies dead, that long yellow narrow body, not like Christ but like one of his saints, the naked ones in the paintings whose bodies are done in gilt, all knees and raw ribs, the ones who died of nettles, bile, the one who died roasted over a slow fire— three months later I take the pot of tulip bulbs out of the closet and set it on the table and take off the foil hood. The shoots stand up like young green pencils, and there in the room is the comfortable smell of rot, the bulb that did not make it, marked with ridges like an elephant's notched foot, I walk down the hall as if I were moving through the long stem of the tulip toward the closed sheath. In the kitchen I throw a palmful of peppercorns into the saucepan as if I would grow a black tree from the soup, I throw out the rotten chicken part, glad again that we burned my father before one single bloom of mold could grow up out of him, maybe it had begun in his bowels but we burned his bowels the way you burn the long blue scarf of the dead, and all their clothing, cleansing with fire. How fast time goes now that I'm happy, now that I know how to think of his dead body every day without shock, almost without grief, to take it into each part of the day the way a loom parts the vertical threads, half to the left half to the right like the Red Sea and you throw the shuttle through with the warp-thread attached to the feet, that small gold figure of my father— how often I saw him in paintings and did not know him, the tiny naked dead one in the corner, the mortal one.  ====In the poem "__The Mortal One__", by Sharon Olds, it begans with a woman making a meal in her kitchen, a soup to be more specific. As said before, Sharon Olds is known for writing poetry from the perspective of women and their everyday life, which lead the main character of this poem to start recolating on her father who had past away. In the line, "throw the shuttle through with the warp-thread...", at first this line made little to no sense to me, but after visiting the dictionary more than once I started to make sense of it. The line was a metaphor on how she goes about each day with as little grief as possible, by taking it apart and splitting it down the middle, the way a loom does when sewing. The woman was trying to get over the death of her father by pointing out good things, for example she was pleased that they had cremated her father before he could decompose. ====
 * The Mortal One**


 * May 1968**

When the Dean said we could not cross campus until the students gave up the buildings, we lay down, in the street, we said the cops will enter this gate over us. Lying back on the cobbles, I saw the buildings of New York City from dirt level, they soared up and stopped, chopped off--above them, the sky, the night air over the island. The mounted police moved, near us, while we sang, and then I began to count, 12, 13, 14, 15, I counted again, 15, 16, one month since the day on that deserted beach, 17, 18, my mouth fell open, my hair on the street, if my period did not come tonight I was pregnant. I could see the sole of a cop's shoe, the gelding's belly, its genitals-- if they took me to Women's Detention and did the exam on me, the speculum, the fingers--I gazed into the horse's tail like a comet-train. All week, I had thought about getting arrested, half-longed to give myself away. On the tar-- one brain in my head, another, in the making, near the base of my tail-- I looked at the steel arc of the horse's shoe, the curve of its belly, the cop's nightstick, the buildings streaming up away from the earth. I knew I should get up and leave, but I lay there looking at the space above us, until it turned deep blue and then ashy, colorless, Give me this one night, I thought, and I'll give this child the rest of my life, the horse's heads, this time, drooping, dipping, until they slept in a circle around my body and my daughter