Emma+Hersh

"Poetry is the doorway to the soul" -Floria
**Memory poem**: **The Old House** We had to wait for darkness Saturn, he said We'll see Saturn Subtle reflections the asphalt the sky the telescope they flew to my eye pupil starry in awe Her dress like the sky that night in the darkness the velvet the stars that swayed with her and sang with her We giggled and sang and danced around in circles The room watching just as we watched Saturn

**Another Memory Poem** Ugly and selfish but beautiful and selfless Why would we want to be around someone who gets pleasure from making us feel like fools because we're all you got better stop or you'll be lonely but so will we

**an ode to Red**

from two dramatic sides the color Red sees it all from love to blood and tango shoes on a dancer to the bandanna on my head to splatters of paint strategically flung on a canvas to the paper cut from being careless to the scratch from a cat being ferocious to the bullet wound from being heroic Red is the color in your eyes when anger washes over you Red is the color in your eyes when you cry when the hurt from the wound finds its way to your brain Red is the blood that runs through your veins and Red is the heart that pumps it

**Riff Poem: Be Strong** Lady i swear by all flowers and i swear by all stars you're not Alone know your friends as they know you you're not Alone but they could never because you never could you're not Alone you won't give in but you can because you're not Alone don't blame yourself don't beat yourself up you're not Alone and Lady if you feel invisible and Lady if you feel lost if you feel this way here's what i'll say Lady i swear by all flowers and i swear by all stars you're not Alone

Ta-tap ta-tap ta-tap ta-tap ta-tap Tap to the beat of the music in your Feet and they hit the street just like anyone Else’s head they bob up and down and In and out of reality – they sway Through their dreams they search for relevance Through life and death and in between with love With them and him and her and without a Doubt you love the universe for what it Is the world a place we call earth or is It just floating in space with nothing but The music of silence – the music of A beep a beat a boom a float we feel Irrelevant we tap our feet to the music of ___
 * Sonnet: Alien **

In my poetry I noticed that I use a lot of repetition to get my point across. I also don’t like using punctuation and I often continue blocked lines on 2 or more lines. I have themes of being alone or feeling upset or frustrated and thinking about the world in a different way. These come from observations about people in everyday life and also from my friends who might have troublesome lives or maybe really good lives. It’s also from just how I feel as I go through different things during the day. Writing poetry with prompts or a certain way of writing made me aware of the choices that I make when writing poetry. I learned to play with capitalization and punctuation as I write to change the meaning. Capitalization, punctuation and spaces change the meaning of what you are saying and I learned that my poetry could be taken in many ways. I like to leave some pieces out of my poetry and not make it very obviously specific to what I’m talking about because I like to leave a lot of it up to interpretation. I think interpretation is important because it makes a unique idea or feeling for each person that reads it.
 * Analysis of my Poetry **

**Poet Analysis: Walt Whitman** Walt Whitman was born in New York in 1819 – 1892. He studied journalism and learned to print. He wrote many short stories, poetry and founded a newspaper. Whitman’s most famous book of poetry is Leaves of Grass. His poetry was written in free form, which was considered revolutionary because other poetry was written in forms that were already created- traditional styles. He writes in the form of sentences and rarely uses periods, he continues sentences on the next line if he needs to and only capitalizes words when they are at the beginning of a sentence. Overall his poetry is about observations that he wrote down and turned inside out to make them more complex to decipher. All of the poetry of Walt Whitman I decided to analyze is from Leaves of Grass. Each poem is titled Thought and finding connections between them was tricky however obvious. Because they are all called Thought I tried to find an overall theme to make them easier to think about. Some of his poems were only two or three lines though, because he didn’t think any more needed to be said. Even in the short poems I found connections to the longer ones. I named the first Thought poem Astronomer because it seemed to me that he was listening to him talk and wrote his observations about his speech and the way he spoke. He talks about how perfectly the Astronomer speaks “When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the room,” and the way it made him feel, “How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick.” I thought of this as jealousy and feeling imperfect to the successful astronomer. I found a connection with the fourth Thought poem. This poem is one long sentence broken into three lines about human equality. The first like starts with “Of” and the others start with “rights.” I think this is a poem where he states his rights as a human. He says that he is equal to everyone else but that if we’re all equal then we are no longer independent from everyone else. In Thought poem number 5 he talks about the system in which we all live. He uses ABAB line rhyming. The words in his poems don’t rhyme but alternating lines have a similar theme and talk about the same people. Line one set up the analysis, lines 3-5 talks about rich people, “They appear gaunt and naked.” Lines 6-7 about poor people, “The core of life, namely happiness is full of the rotten excrement of maggots.” This poem’s meaning is that you don’t need to have much to be happy and those who have very little are usually happier because they know who they are. Something I wondered about when reading these various poems was whether or not what he was talking about related to him. Did he want to be an astronomer? Does he want all men to be created equal; does he believe that they are? Does he think that he is at the bottom of the food chain? What I was curious about was if writing saved him. I don’t know what it might’ve saved him from but maybe he wrote when he was feeling lost or unsure of something. Maybe he just needed to write it down