Problem
After reading these both poems answer the following questions:
The Mentor BY GABRIELLE BATES
He carved faces into the dead parts of cedars.
He wore a belt of chisels around his waist.
To determine where they were dead,
he took a leafless limb, followed it like thread
back to its spool, down the corresponding strip of trunk.
In the middle of those woods, where the ground
sloped into a large bowl, mist often got trapped,
parted at our calves. We walked together for a long time,
and as we walked, he traced what I said
back to my left breast, down to the tender hole
where I was once attached to my mother
until I went silent. Then, he braced my back
against a tree. He took out a chisel and kneeled.
You ask when I stopped shouting everything
and started keeping language close to my mouth
as if? I were reading to a match that had to last my life.
Well it was not that day. That was much later,
after the trees had all been cleared and the earth
leveled. When I stopped begging to be believed
and started telling the truth-no man was there.
To Those Who Have Lost Everything BY FRANCISCO X. ALARCÓN
crossed
in despair
many deserts
full of hope
carrying
their empty
fists of sorrow
everywhere
mouthing
a bitter night
of shovels
and nails
"you're nothing
you're shit
your home's
nowhere"-
mountains
will speak
for you
rain
will flesh
your bones
green again
among ashes
after a long fire
started in
a fantasy island
some time ago
turning
Natives
into aliens
Task
1. Describe what is literally happening in the first poem.
2. Describe what's literally happening in the second poem.
3. What is the point of the first poem? How do you know?
4. What is the point of the second poem? How do you know?
5. Compare the two. What similarities do they have in the points they are making? What differences do you see?