Samrah's Stories

Dear Langston Hughes I’ve never been a poetry person. In fact, I have always despised poetry (I still do). The only time I have read poetry was when I was forced to for an English class. I have never really liked a poem until I read and annotated Mother to Son for my Sonnet annotation. Most of the poems we’ve looked at have been either abstract or concrete, but the abstract ones had themes so obscure and niche that they felt like riddles with no answers, while the concrete ones didnt really have any impact on me. Thus, any poem I read was instantly burned from the neural networks of my brain. But your poem managed to stay. Especially these lines: “Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.” This was a theme that actually applied to my life. Life isn’t easy. It’s full of hardships, setbacks, moments that feel impossible to push through. But we can never back down because pushing through, enduring, and overcoming is what makes life worth living. Another line that really stuck with me was “For...

Before: He commands all storms he raises his hands up, his breath freezes the air, he pulls the clouds together, They stay still waiting for his call His hands fall and then they break, spilling white flakes everywhere. the Trees begin to bend the roads disappear His voice rings out And the wind’s howl wildly when the storms power beings to creep the world becomes quiet, buried deep After: He calls the storms with his hands raised up his breath freezes, the air is still. Clouds? They wait His hands drop, and crack, the flakes fall scattered, chaos falls from the sky. The trees bend they shouldn’t be bending. Roads? Gone. His voice? Is it even a voice? The howl is there, as his power begins to creep the world becomes quiet too quiet— burying everything deep. In my revision, I tried let the chaos of the poem mirror the chaos of the storm. When I was breaking down the poem, I was trying to make it imperfect and funky just how Dickinson and Keats used imperfecti...