Chunking Poetry Is Fun: My Analysis on Hymn for the Hurting
Everything hurts,
Our hearts shadowed and strange,
We carry tragedy, terrifying and true.
We knew it as home,
As horror,
As heritage.
Even our children
Cannot be children,
Cannot be.
It’s a hard time to be alive,
And even harder to stay that way.
We’re burdened to live out these days,
While at the same time, blessed to outlive them.
We must be altered —
That we must differ or die,
That we must triumph or try.
Thus while hate cannot be terminated,
Into a love that lets us live.
May we not just ache, but act;
May our signed right to bear arms
Never blind our sight from shared harm;
The mentor poet I chose to learn from was Amanda Gorman, who is a 25 year old African-American poet and activist. I decided to choose her primarily because of the compelling topics of her poetry. She focuses a lot of her poetry on relevant issues in the United States such as race and marginalization. In addition, she is the youngest poet to read at a presidential inauguration in the history of the United States. The poem I chose to chunk and annotate was “Hymn for the Hurting”. It is a very powerful and emotional poem that addresses the school shooting tragedy in Uvalde, Texas in 2022.
The poem begins with “everything hurts,” and we see the repetition of this phrase in the 2nd stanza which highlights that tragedies, like this school shooting, paralyze the country and leave a lasting wound in many people. It shows how much burden and suffering this tragedy has put on the entire country. Then Gorman points out that children cannot be children anymore essentially because these frequent school shootings embed fear in their minds that cause children to lose their innocence and childhood. These tragedies have caused so much pain and suffering that children are no longer children anymore. Furthermore, I think that part of this poem is also a call to action that calls for unity, hope, and change as a nation. Ultimately, Gorman believes that hate can’t be destroyed, but it can be transformed into love. Additionally, school shootings act as an alarm of change. During these dark times, change and action must occur in order to save innocent lives and move forward from this pain. It’s important to realize that taking steps toward change has to come from this grief and suffering. At the end, Gorman emphasizes that moments of tragedy and loss are the moments where it’s crucial to find hope, unity, and change in our country.
My annotations (I don’t know why it’s so blurry)
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