Responding to a Peom

After reading these poems, the two that stood out the most to me were “Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting” by Kevin Powers and “Rites of Passage” by Sharon Olds. These poems are very different but both of them affected me. To me the poem entitled “Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting” was about a war veteran writing home to his wife or his girlfriend. He is telling her how important she is to him and how much he loves her. I do not know what it is like to be in war and separated from your significant other so I will not pretend to know. However, I do know what it is like to be apart for a long period of time from loved one. Last summer, my mother had a stroke and had also developed a brain aneurysm so my family flew out to Minnesota to go to the Mayo Clinic and we were there for about four months. I know you are gone much longer when you are in the service but those four months were torture for me. I was going through a very tough time emotional with the potential of losing my mother, which I didn’t by the way, and I didn’t have the one girl that I loved there to comfort me. This is the reason why I connected to this one very strongly.

In Sharon Olds poem “Rites of Passage,” she writes about a much forgotten rite of passage, the common birthday. Her young son is the one who is having the birth day and all the other boys, along with him, are discussing their physical abilities against the younger, less advanced men. I grew up with three other brothers, two of them older. Although it was not exactly like this poem, my brothers often thought that because they are older, they could do what they wanted to me because they were, in fact, older. However, when I was getting to that stage in my life, I grew into that state of mind. I picked on my little brother who is four years younger than I am. I regret this now because he is now a couple inches taller than me and only fifteen years old.