Saturday, November 15, 2014

Flight

"Flight," by Miranda Beeson, is a captivating poem, following the events of 9/11. In the poem, Beeson does not merely give overly-depressing descriptions of the events which took place. Instead, she uses a finch to signify hope after that tragic day. The finch shows up, quite mysteriously, and Beeson describes it as possibly hailing from "a pet store in the shadow of the towers," or "a tiny door unlatched by the blasts." Beeson follows with "We pondered dark scenarios." This seems to catch the mindset of everyone following September 11th. We were negative, we felt this defeat on our shoulders; a feeling that we are vulnerable to the troubles of the world around us. Yet Beeson doesn't think we should keep those negative thoughts prevalent. She describes the finch as being "more important than anything else we could think of those first few weeks," which seems to shed a positive light. While there is all of this chaos, disorder and tragedy, there is still light; we still have this beacon of hope, this finch, which seemingly survived these events, to represent our strength, our spirit. This poem was beautiful, and it resonated throughout my mind all day after reading it. 

1 comment:

  1. Cory,
    Here we see another post-9/11 writer using the description of "in the shadow of the towers"; Spiegelman titles his piece "in the shadow of no towers." It might be interesting to compare how different post-9/11 writers use this imagery of the shadow of the towers and images of light and darkness more generally in their writing...
    ~MS

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