Poem found here: "We Never Know" by Yusef Komunyakaa War poems are hard to do. I had a professor once ask a class, "where is all the famous war poems from Vietnam, or the Iraq war?" And I just didn't know. In this poem, "We Never Know," the setting is on the battlefield, but the emotions come out to the forefront. "He danced with tall grasses / for a moment, like he was swaying / with a women" The simile brings together two strange situations together -- a man dancing in the grass and swaying as though dancing. This feels like the speaker trying to project an emotion to a mundane situation until we get a little more context "Our gun barrels / glowed white-hot." This is an interesting way of stating guns were shot. At first, I thought it was the collective "our" like everyone was on the same side. And this idea plays on later in this poem, but the immediate has dire consequences, "When I got to him / a blue hal...
Formerly the RetailMFA, This is the Poetry Blog of Darrell Dela Cruz