Joy Harjo "Deer Dancer"

            Joy Harjo crafts a unique poem pertaining to a cultural shift in morals and life-style to a strict heritage of people in "Deer Dancer."  She also encompasses the inner feelings and desires of women of the night by relating their life-style of frivolous dancing for income to a deer.   The symbol of a deer represents how the wild and untamed beast they become when they dance is natural to them and has become natural to the society due all the changes in morality.  The bar where all the strippers, lowlifes, thugs, and as the poem describes, "broken survivors, the club of shotgun, knife wound, of poison by culture," is not only where these individuals gather but their hardships of life.  The bar contains principals of culture that have spiraled downward into pool of pain that only the dancers can cure with their dance that is sacred to them.  Her mystical movements clean the broken-hearted men or women that fill that place but in turn create more troubles thoughts of her own.  

Gwendolyn Brookes "Saudie and Maud"

            Gwendolyn Brooks accomplishes invoking the roll of the 1940s African American female in her poem "Sadie and Maud" by portraying their different social identities that black women could have.  One of the obvious rolls given is the young girl that successfully becomes a college graduate, but at the price of her youth.  The other is girl who skipped out on the option of going to college to enjoy herself and the beauty of her youth and working through life.  These two girls do differentiate in their rolls by shame accompanying the girl who used her beauty to pass through life and the other partnered with loneliness for pursuing education.  And even though Saudie's beauty brought two children that the rest of her family didn't approve of, she still had more pride and love for those two girls than her sister did.  Moral of the story, don't be so judgmental of the actions of other because karma is a bitch.  

Ted Hughes "The Horses"

Ted Hughes "The Horses" is one of the more eerier poems that I have read this year.  Its dark tone and damp theme instinctively and instantly create the idea that the four legged beasts represent death and the terror they bring with them.  Hughes goes into deep detail of the dismal scene of the woods and frost surrounding the animals with finer imagery than most poems I interpret.  At first glance, these horses seem to be representing one of the four apocalyptic horses, death, but Hughes sheds light into the poem by shedding light.  By doing this he not only changes tone and theme for the piece but what the horses represent themselves.  He includes that a "red light" splits through the clouds.  To me, this imagery created  not only a stronger theme for death but for the murderous idea of war.  Hughes says in stanza seventeen, " In din of crowded streets, going among the years, the faces/May I still meet my memory in so lonely a place," and creates that these horses have a job to do and nothing will stand in their way.