Here is the second of our three poets who responded to and analyzed their own work:

(Reese added line numbers so she could cite her lines, they were not part of the original poem.

My poem…..

        FALLING

 By: Reese

Dear Marla and Vanessa,

 This is the poem that I will be responding to this week;

FALLING

1 The leaves fall,

2 Onto the dusty ground,

3 down

4 Away from the trees

5 Drying up

6 A fool of sorrow,

7 Forever living,

8 But it’s not a life

9 Forever falling

10 The trees stand taller than before

11 Over top

12 Higher up

13 Always growing

14 Into what used to be

15 And the trees,

16 They reign their world

    While writing this poem, my intentions were to say that people who bully others seem to have higher expectations for people. I wrote this poem about someone who thinks highly of themselves. I used the fall season as a literary device to symbolize conflict from people that may exclude or are mean to others. I did not write this poem to point out people or things, but personally, I think that this shouldn’t be happening in the world. I symbolized the lesson with leaves and trees to display this situation in a way that would be more meaningful and easier to understand/picture in your mind.

   Throughout the poem, I implied that the leaves are “lower” than the trees. The trees are to symbolize people who are mean, jealous, or think they are better, ect.,ect. The “leaves” are to symbolize people who are being bullied or have a low self esteem, ect.,ect.

   My first example is from lines 1-9.

Throughout these lines I explain about the leaves falling onto the ground. As in the poem, it says:  “fall onto the dusty ground                 down away from the trees”, I tried to make this as a perspective of what the “tree” people would think about the “leaf” people. So, because these two types of people aren’t fond of each other, I made the ground “dusty” and the “leaf people” are falling onto it. And as I wrote  “forever falling” in line 9, they are forever falling into the dusty ground. In other words, always going to be lower than “me” ( tree person perspective only for the poem.) always going to be a “bad person”. That is what I think a “tree person” would be thinking about.

  Going back to lines 4-8.

The leaves fall farther from the trees, meaning they never get closer to “the trees’ level”. On lines 5 and 6, I wrote about the leaves drying up, and a fool of sorrow. What I was implying was that once the leaves were on the ground, they would stay there forever. I also said this in line 9. I did this so a certain lesson would be told in different analogies. When I wrote “fool of sorrow” it meant that technically, the trees were the king, and the leaves were the fools of the sorrow. Sorrow as in sadness and a fool of it, would be a very sad and miserable life. Some people feel like this because of people that are mean. AKA “the tree people”.

 In lines 10-13,I told about the trees being higher and standing taller than before. This part is self-explanatory but I was Implying that, to the “leaf people” the trees would be so much farther away now, because as said before, the leaves are forever falling. And once you are so close to someone, like the leaves were to the trees, and then suddenly you are torn apart by an autumn gust that blows you off into nothing, you wouldn’t be very happy. The tree people would be like a fake friend. And now that you are gone, in lines 15-16, the tree can now “reign their world.”

 Overall, I really like the message that I gave through this poem, and this is probably my favorite poem out of my 5-poem poetry book. I really enjoyed writing this poem in honor of some people at my old school that would be bullied all the time, and were scared to talk to anyone else. This message means a lot to me and I hope that you enjoyed this poem too.

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