MGRP: Poem Compilation

Directions: Find three poems or songs that have a common theme that link to your topic
through a common theme. Analyze each poem or song for literary techniques and meaning.
This can be through a paragraph or through detailed annotation. Finally write a paragraph
connecting each poem or song to each other and to your topic through a common theme.
Specific reference must be made to each poem or song.

Poem/Song #1

Song Title Mother Earth: Her Whales

Poet/Songwriter Gary Snyder

An owl winks in the shadows

A lizard lifts on tiptoe, breathing hard
Young male sparrow stretches up his neck,
big head, watching
The grasses are working in the sun. Turn it green.
Turn it sweet. That we may eat.
Grow our meat.
Brazil says sovereign use of Natural Resources
Thirty thousand kinds of unknown plants.
The living actual people of the jungle
sold and tortured
And a robot in a suit who peddles a delusion called Brazil
can speak for them?
The whales turn and glisten, plunge
and sound and rise again,
Hanging over subtly darkening deeps
Flowing like breathing planets
in the sparkling whorls of
living light
And Japan quibbles for words on
what kinds of whales they can kill?
A once-great Buddhist nation
dribbles methyl mercury
like gonorrhea
in the sea.
Pere Davids Deer, the Elaphure,
Lived in the tule marshes of the Yellow River
Two thousand years agoand lost its home to rice
The forests of Lo-yang were logged and all the silt &
Sand flowed down, and gone, by 1200 AD
Wild Geese hatched out in Siberia
head south over basins of the Yang, the Huang,
 what we call China
On flyways they have used a million years.
Ah China, where are the tigers, the wild boars,
the monkeys,
like the snows of yesteryear
Gone in a mist, a flash, and the dry hard ground
Is parking space for fifty thousand trucks.
IS man most precious of all things?
then let us love him, and his brothers, all those
Fading living beings
North America, Turtle Island, taken by invaders
who wage war around the world.
May ants, may abalone, otters, wolves and elk
Rise! and pull away their giving
from the robot nations.
Solidarity. The People.
Standing Tree People!
Flying Bird People!
Swimming Sea People!
Four-legged, two-legged people!
How can the head-heavy power-hungry politic scientist
Government two-world Capitalist-Imperialist
Third-world Communist paper-shuffling male
non-farmer jet-set bureaucrats
Speak for the green of the leaf? Speak for the soil?
(Ah Margaret Mead . . . do you sometimes dream of Samoa?)
The robots argue how to parcel out our Mother Earth
To last a little longer
like vultures flapping
Belching, gurgling,
near a dying doe.
In yonder field a slain knight lies
Well fly to him and eat his eyes
with a down
derry derry derry down down.
An Owl winks in the shadow
A lizard lifts on tiptoe
breathing hard
The whales turn and glisten
plunge and
Sound, and rise again
Flowing like breathing planets
In the sparkling whorls
Of living light.
 The first two paragraphs are about Brazil before human interaction
Literary Techniques took place. The second paragraph in particular is an ABCCC rhyme
and Analysis scheme, its also very bad. The third paragraph concerns itself with the
human interaction in the Brazilian ecosystem and its native people.It
also contains a stance against political borders.Kind of like
communism, The 4th paragraph contains a section on the oceanic
ecosystem, specifically on whales. The 5th paragraph is about the
Japanese impact on this oceanic life, through hunting and pollution in
the ocean. The rest is some rhetoric about all animals being people,
hence paragraph 8, and more crap about humans being invaders of
their own planet.

Poem/Song #2

Song Title Some Effects of Global Warming in Lackawanna County

Poet/Songwriter Jay Parini

The maples sweat now, out of season.

Buds pop eyes in wintry bushes
as the birds arrive, not having checked
the calendars or clocks. They scramble
in the frost for seeds, while underground
a sobbing starts in roots and tubers.
Ice cracks easily along the bank.
It slides in gullies where a bear, still groggy,
steps through coiled wire o
f the weeds.
Kids in T-shirts run to school, unaware
that summer is a long way off.
Their teachers flirt with off-the-wall assignments,
drum their fingers on the sweaty desktops.
As for me, my heart leaps high
a deer escaping from the crosshairs,
skipping over barely frozen water
as the surface bends and splinters underfoot.

Literary Techniques Line 1: Fall is coming early

and Analysis Line 2-6:Spring coming early
Line 7: Ice is not freezing properly
Gullies- ditches
Groggy- dazed and weakened
Line 10-11- summer coming in spring
Line 15-16- Ice again melting in the spring
Poem/Song #3

Song Title THE EARTH SLOWLY FADING

Poet/Songwriter mariaspary10

Everywhere I look, all I can see is garbage

To my left I see my friend, drowing in pollution
To my right I see another suffocating on plastic
Above me there is so sun, no light, no warmth
Smog covers the sun, allowing little light to seep through
The ice at the poles begins to melt, taking homes away from many
How many have to die before people realize their impact on the world
Trees wilt, flowers die, bees disappear, life begins to disappear
Yet the people do nothing to help
My sight is fading, I'm losing energy, and soon I will be no more
Please, stop this death, stop the pollution, stop the destruction of the world

Line 1: Everywhere -hyperbole ,All I can see is garbage hyperbole

Literary Techniques Line 2: Friend - hyperbole, drowing in pollution misspelled and
and Analysis metaphor
Line 3: Suffocating on plastic- hyperbole
Line 5:Smog covers the sun - metaphor (smog covers the Earth)
Line 8: life begins to disappear -hyperbole (life goes on kid)
Line 10:My sight is fading - metaphor (say no to dope)
Line 11: Please, stop this death diction changes to edgy girl mode
The poem represents an extended metaphor.

Write a paragraph discussing how the poems/songs connect to your topic and each other. You
must make specific reference to each of the poems/songs.

These all connect to my topic because they are prime examples of how many of the liberal
persuasion try to preach to either the government, corporations, or the general public a sort of
action to stop global warming, without a lot of prior knowledge of what makes global
warming. For example, many of these poems rely on exaggerations or confusions about what
global warming even is. In the poem Some Effects of Global Warming in Lackawanna
County, the writer states The maples sweat now, out of season.
...a deer escaping from the crosshairs,skipping over barely frozen water...Kids in T-shirts run to
school, unaware that summer is a long way off. All of these may be true, but they are not
examples of climate but weather changes.Even NASA and the GISS admits that their data from
1880 shows a difference in climate change of not even a degree celsius, invalidating the claim
this is due to global warming. As in the poem THE EARTH SLOWLY FADING (all caps
necessary), the author relies on exaggerations of pollution in the air. For example, All I can
see is garbage...[A friend] Suffocating on plastic...Smog covers the sun. The only reason the
only thing you could see is garbage is if you live in a landfill, or you wear a trash bin as
clothes. As for smog, it covers the earth, not the sun, unless we are in imagination land, in
which it also touches the moon. In Mother Earth: Her Whales, the author takes a bigger on
human colonization of the planet, something humans do not deserve. For example, IS man
most precious of all things...May ants, may abalone, otters, wolves and elk
Rise!. In this case the poem focuses more on the importance of animal domination of humans,
rather than climate change. Nonetheless the interaction in climate is forgivable.