Poetic License

When people ask how, I say
a fire took them.
And then they look at me like
I’m the most pitiful thing in the world.
So sometimes I just shrug and say
They just died, that’s all.

A fire took their bodies.
That’s all.

I can still feel their voices and hugs and laughing.
Sometimes.
Sometimes I can hear my daddy
calling my name.
Lonnie sometimes.
And sometimes Locomotion
come on over here a minute.
I want to show you something.

And then I see his big hands
holding something out to me.

It used to be the four of us.
At night we went to sleep.
In the morning we woke up and ate breakfast.
Daddy worked for Con Edison.
You ever saw him?
Climbing out of a manhole?
Yellow tape keeping the cars from coming
down the block.
An orange sign that said Men Working.
I still got his hat. It’s light blue
with CON EDISON in white letters.

Mama was a receptionist.
When you called the office where she worked,
she answered the phone like this
Graftman Paper Products, how may I help you?
It was her work voice.
And when you said something like
Ma, it’s me.
her voice went back to normal. To our mama’s voice
Hey Sugar. You behaving? Is the door locked?

That stupid fire couldn’t take all of them.
Nothing could do that.

Nothing.

The poem I chose titled “Parents Poem” by Jacqueline Woodson has a fairly clear narrative. After reading through the poem once you can almost feel exactly what she’s trying to say and how she feels about what she’s speaking about. This would be the death of her parents in some sort of fire. The diction she uses in her poem is rather upfront and descriptive leaving little to the imagination on how her parents passed away; “A fire took their bodies. Thats all.” After the rather shallow intro as to what happened with her parents she proceeds to to display a rather pleasing, or a more sympathetic image as to the memory of her parents. Describing where her father worked and the typical themes that would take place in an average day in either of their lives. The last two lines of the poem show us the central image of whats being said or brought to light through her words. That is that even with the tragic way her parents left this world, that nothing would take away her memories of the hard working, loving caretakers that they were for her, meanwhile still showing a bit of resentment for the way that they passed.