This poem was written based on the bombing of a church in the city of Birmingham in 1963. The 60's were an extreme time of tribulation and triumph for the Civil Rights Movement. This poem is a conversation between a fearful mother and an ambitious child. I think this poem was intended to inform everyone about what everyday life was like in Birmingham, AL. The constant oppression and terror of living in one of the most segregated cities in the country during this time period, was certainly implied and represented in this poem. I am sure, from my knowledge of U.S. History, that the destruction of places where African Americans sought comfort was all too common. The mother openly expresses her fear in letting her young daughter roam the Freedom March, but allows her daughter to travel to the local church. Little did the mother know that the church would be the next target of the people who were pro-segregation. I believe the central focus of this poem is to expose the atrocities that happened extremely often during the Civil Rights Movement and to make the reader feel empathetic and to tear at the heartstrings.
In the fifth stanza, the extensive use of color-related diction creates a vivid image in the reader’s mind. For example, “night-dark hair” (17), “rose petal sweet” (18), “white gloves…shoes” (19-20), and “small brown hands” (19). Each line of this poem brings the reader along a story, and is not filled with ambiguous language, but instead takes advantage of descriptive and colloquial language. The mother in this poem repeatedly refers to her daughter as her “baby”, which I inferred as the mother still seeing her daughter as the light of her life, and childlike, even though we are unsure how old she is.
In stanza number six, the quotation, “The mother smiled to know her child Was in the sacred place” (21-22). This showcases irony because the mother is relieved that her daughter is at church instead of at the Freedom March, but the church was a place of danger it turns out as well.
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