While reading through the assigned poems I accidentally flipped back a page and was immediately intrigued by the line “and when they bombed other people’s houses, we.” The lower case “and” beginning gave the impression of an ongoing dialogue conveying the feeling of being stuck in shock or inner turmoil, almost as if the reader had entered into the middle of a perpetual confession. I didn’t read the title until after reading the first line, and although it wasn’t a difficult leap to make I enjoyed the complexity brought by the concepts of “living” and “happiness” mingling with “war.” As I kept on reading I found myself appreciating the line breaks
“but not enough, we opposed them but not
enough. I was”
that left me with a sense of combined hesitance and breathlessness. I related this combination to the difficulty of acknowledging the moments in which we don’t do enough, or neglect to assume responsibility for the fact that we all exist in ecological communities. The last thing that caught my attention about this poem was the use of parentheses in the second to last line. I think that the parentheses afford the statement “we (forgive us)” a murkiness that is really important here, as it is left to the reader to decide if the speaker is requesting forgiveness from the reader/victims of war or stating the fact that the “we” (a pronoun which likely includes many American readers) have already forgiven one another.
-Christy L. Agrawal