"Vermin"
"What do you want to be when you grow up?"
What child cries out, "An Exterminator!"?
One dilligent student in Mrs. Taylor's class will get an ant farm for Christmas,
but he'll not see industry; he'll see dither.
"The ant sets an example for us all," wrote Max Beerbohm, a master of dawdle,
"but it is not a good one."
Those children don't hope to outlast the doldrums of school
only to heft great weights and work in squads and die for their queen.
Well, neither did we.
And we knew what we didn't want to be: the ones we looked down on,
the lambs of God, blander than snow
and slow to be cruel.
-- William Matthews from The New Yorker, 1997.
I put the line breaks where I did because the poem started off like a conversation to me.So I wanted the questions on one line and the answers on the next line.Also while I read this poem the breaks were natural pauses, so I added a break there too.The poem is about how we have decisions and choices unlike ants who do not have that same pleasure.With this in my I decided that I didn't want more than one action or point in a line.So I divided the poem so that each line is able to have a significant point.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
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