poetry response #3

Alright, so I really liked both of these poems. "homage to my hips" made me smile because it brought back growing up with my mom and how she always joked around that black women have big hips and how proud they were of it (I'm black so it's okay to say stuff like that?). The poem is almost a representation of freedom and the ability to do what you want. The particular "enslavement" line didn't mean anything besides what it said until I found out that the author was African American, which I feel like says something about the way our society is (or some faulty wiring in my brain). It's a poem about empowerment which is a cool thing to think about because how often do people find courage in their bodies so openly?

"A Woman Who Could Not Live With a Faulty Heart" really spoke to me because it was borderline cynical and used some serious imagery to un-romanticize "feelings of the heart", something that I do frequently. I thought at first that the narrator was talking about a heart that's torn between two ideas, two emotions, two people but then I wondered if she literally meant "a faulty heart" as in a unsteady rhythm, a heart murmur or something of the like. A heart where something extreme could happen and her heart could could be still. Still, the narrator laments the beating of her heart - "a constant pestering" - which makes me wonder if the narrator was so torn by whatever decision that she was teetering on self-destruction. Why else would someone call their heartbeat pestering?

I don't know, I think the images created are meant to be dark and set the mood for you to really understand how a heart physically works. But I think that it's a representation of the futility of life = constantly a struggle between what you want and what you don't want and in the end you'll die soon. This is a sharp juxtaposition of "homage to my hips" which is really saying "i can do whatever i want to, watch me seduce this guy". Two very different poems that used repetition in a similar way to produce a different outcome. Am a fan, 10/10, would read again