Poetry Collection- Maddie Wheeler

Robert Hayden was born as Asa Bundy Sheffey in Detroit in the year 1913. His parents separated before his birth and he was mostly raised by his neighbors, who gave him their name. Hayden was the first African American to serve the office of what is now the US Poet Laureate. His works largely include content about race, social class, abuse, and other things he was surrounded by since he grew up in a ghetto of Detroit. The poems I am focusing come from his first collection, A Ballad of Remembrance, which was published in 1962. The aforementioned themes are especially prevalent in "Those Winter Sundays," and "The Whipping."

The Whipping

The old woman across the way
is whipping the boy again
and shouting to the neighborhood
her goodness and his wrongs.

Wildly he crashes through elephant ears,
pleads in dusty zinnias,
while she in spite of crippling fat
pursues and corners him.

She strikes and strikes the shrilly circling
boy till the stick breaks
in her hand. His tears are rainy weather
to woundlike memories:

My head gripped in bony vise
of knees, the writhing struggle
to wrench free, the blows, the fear
worse than blows that hateful

Words could bring, the face that I
no longer knew or loved ...
Well, it is over now, it is over,
and the boy sobs in his room,

And the woman leans muttering against
a tree, exhausted, purged –
avenged in part for lifelong hidings
she has had to bear.

This poem focuses largely on the absence of a home. Many poems in this collection can be related to a theme of not belonging, not feeling loved, and longing for a home. This poem is especially sad due to its graphic and horrifying content of abuse. The only evidence of a home in this piece is that the boy cries in his room. He seeks a comfortable and safe place. The theme of looking for comfort and safety in family also appears in "Those Winter Sundays" when the narrator discusses his father being thanked, and not knowing how to behave around someone who is your flesh and blood but who also knows you so little. 
If I was to attempt to create good poetry I think I would take a similar approach to Hayden's and write about the struggles that I have faced or witnessed. The struggles I have faced in my life would obviously be a lot different to that of Hayden's since I grew up in a happy home with my own married parents, but the same basic principles would be there. In my own journal I write about what I know, I write about how I feel, and I would take the same approach to poetry.