A brief explication

Photo by Celine Chamberlin

The poem is titled "First Shift." The narrator of this poem is a younger person who lives with their father and grandparents. This young narrator gives a pretty vivid image of what times were like in the household. The father and the grandparents wake up very early in the morning to get a jump start on the day. "The four-thirty whistle won't wake him this morning. My father's awake, dreaming of paychecks." This family is very hardworking, and they leave home very early and walk to work in the dark. The narrator wants to help the family make money, but they cannot follow except in memory. So I figure the narrator is too young to go to work, therefore they cannot help provide for the family. The narrator must really appreciate the hard work of the family, because this hard work provides food and shelter to keep them safe. To me it's sad to see grandparents waking up very early in the morning and having to walk to work. This poem really makes me appreciate all the little things in life, and it reminds me that nothing comes easy in life.

What I've learned from this project

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Blogging is like poetry to me very new. This project has taught me a few new things about the Internet and posting information for others to see. Before I started this project I had no idea on how to blog or what blogging even was. Now I know how to set up blogs add pictures and edit them to however I chose. Blogging is actually fun and very helpful when it comes to organizing thoughts and information for others to see. Blogging also allows other users to provide comments and helpful insight to your own post. I think blogging is a good thing to use to create discussion topics and to involve many people and their thoughts into a topic matter. I am very glad that I have taken the time to try something new with this blogging, because I believe this will be the way of the future and we are one step closer to creating a virtual chatting environment for everyone to become involved.

How I relate to this poem

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The poem I chose is entitled First Shift and I feel that I can relate to this poem in a few different ways. The poem is about a younger person who is describing his early morning events of his family. The narrator of this poem tells us how their father and grandmother and grandfather would get up before 4:30 in the morning to fix breakfast and head off to work on foot in the dark. The narrator of this poem must be to young to work and help out with money, because they say they cannot follow except in memory. This narrator must appreciate the hard work of his family, because he eats well and rest on the gifts of their labors. I also feel this way when I think about my own parents when I was a young boy. I remember when I was little my mother and father always got out of bed very early. My mother would fix my fathers lunch for him everyday since money was kind of tight. My mother and father have always worked very hard for every thing they own, and they have always made sure that my brother and I were well taken care of. My father worked for the NCDOT as a crew supervisor, but he was not always a supervisor he had to start at the very bottom before he climbed the latter. I can still recall how difficult times seem to be when my brother and I were very young. My parents were both working for a little over three dollars and hour which was just enough for us to get by, so I really appreciate their hard work throughout all the years, and their great sacrifices they made to provide for our family even when times didn't seem so bright.

My "Poetry History"

Photo by Katie Eagleson

My history with poetry is fairly a new thing. Throughout most of my life I have always been a little distant from poetry. I was first introduced to poetry last year in English113. Our class spent 2 weeks on reading different poems from the text book and creating different activities with poetry. In Eng113 I had to create 3 different poems and present them to the class. In these poems I had to illustrate the significance and importance that they had to me. After really examining all of the different contexts that you can receive from poetry I became very interested in poetry. I've always had a belief that all poetry was hard to understand and had difficult wording, but in Eng113 I realized that poetry does not have to be that way. I look at poetry very differently now, I see poetry as being open to interpretation also I think writing poems allows us to be free in our minds and express our thoughts that have significance to us. I am very glad that I have become more open to poetry, because it has allowed me to open up in my writing and poetry also gives me a great appreciation to all of the very talented poets that have ever lived