Joy Harjo “The Path to the Milky Way Leads through Los Angeles”

                Some older traditions held that when our souls departed this world, they travel to a star. Just as one takes a train from point a to point b, our souls take death from earth to a star. I believe that is what this poem is saying, however it is odd that the path to one of those stars, or to the milky way leads through Los Angeles. Harjo mentions that it is a city named after the angels, but is probably more well known as a city of sin. I think that Harjo is not being specific to Los Angeles however. She is being analogous to all cities where we are crowded in with other people. I think that she is trying to communicate some kind of truth behind the reality of looking for good in a place where there is so much bad. I have to ask myself why she uses the Crow to say “wait, wait and see” (line 25) Is it because it is a joke, or a trick rather to try to find something good. I believe this poem could also communicate some sort of secular version of one having must passed a life of sin in order to reach the afterlife. Maybe if I wait and see, then I will find out.

Gwendolyn Brooks “A Song in the Front Yard”

                Gwendolyn Brooks’ poetry is dark, sad, and realistic sounding. You immediately get pictures of non-ideal lives, and the hidden face of America in these poems. It’s no wonder her biography talks of Blues tradition, because that’s what her poems are. “A song in the Front Yard” at first sounds like a middle class American poem of a young girl, but the last stanza reveals to us that it is probably a very poor neighborhood, where prostitutes walk, and a mother is trying to keep her child from being like them. I feel like this poem is slightly activist-like in the way that it illustrates how a young girl cant have the ideal childhood with friends. She is jailed to her front yard, in order to protect her from being subjected to the bad influences of the area, however it seems that the mother is unsuccessful as she has already seen and strives to be like the girls, “And I’d like to be a bad woman, too” (line 18). but only because she hasn’t seen the consequences.