I wrote a small thing at the end of my Poem before turning it in so that the teacher wasn’t too lost.
Repetition is used throughout the poem, bringing up the same question of “what should we tell our children?”. I employ some complex meanings and lots of deep political events that parallel to older events 25+ years ago (Vietnam). The Speaker begs the question, as if to another adult, on what should we tell our children? Should we espouse a bunch of bullshit, beat around the bush, and sugar-coat everything so they can grow up to be an unenlightened apolitical “citizen”, or should we face them with the hard reality of American Society so that they may make informed decisions and consensus on how to reform or revolutionize it?
What will we learn from the napalm, the censorship, the brown kids blown up in the middle east, the rampant white nationalism, if we do not teach it? History will repeat itself so long as we do not learn from it, and that is just one of the complex themes or general ideas I portray in my tiny poem.
- Lines 1-20 introductions/questions
- Line 21 tonal shift
- Lines 22-26 conclusion
Not to mention the simile that parallels Chelsea Manning’s indefinite solitary confinement to the age-old-question of “what should we tell?”
The speaker hates how they were born into total ignorance of how Society truly functions, and as a result highlights that they would “hate to be born again” and relive this ignorance up until their point of enlightenment. They would hate for their children to grow up the same way as them.
Hence the last line that literally means they would rather they (assuming these “children” do not exist yet) be born instead of their own re-birth, and figuratively as in saying to another adult that they’d rather them tell the truth, as the speaker can not fathom telling the children them self the disgusting and horrible truth of reality.