A place to take your mind
off the days events.
Sitting at this table
alone, surrounded.
The buzz of people engulfs you.
Strangers
almost transparent.
They are there
but not here with you.
Blankly staring out the window
you watch.
His stillness catches your eye.
He sits alone in the crowd
much like you.
His dirty face
and ragged
clothes
tell his story.
A shopping cart
of all he owns.
His home an ally
you walk past everyday.
This ragged man
with his tattered soul
alone in the crowd.
Dear Jessi,
ReplyDeleteThank you for posting this and for participating :). I like the way you approach this writing prompt, and especially the way you confront different aspects of social stigmas. I think your poem lends a brief if not great insight into another avenue of social consciousness, one that confronts negative emotions and stereotypes, and that one that urges your audience to reconsider their initial social impressions.
The speaker is an observant individual who takes in a scene that is a difficult one; a homeless stranger who often goes unnoticed is given a few seconds in the spotlight. The empathetic tone of the poem leads the reader through an amalgam of quiet, narrative events. We are first introduced to a quiet environment in the initial stanza:
Sitting at this table
alone, surrounded (3-4).
There is a noticeable contrast created with “alone” and “surrounded” (4) that assists the poem’s aloof and observational mood, as with “blankly staring” (10). Even the noiseless action of the eyes emphasizes the speaker as our spectator. The second stanza also helps to create this contrast, where the reader is introduced to a “buzz of people” (5) and diction that “engulfs” (5). The poem has a consistent conversational tone that narrates while the speaker witnesses the “He” (13) who is without company, and presents a meta-cognitive approach by giving the reader an observation within an observation as we see this individual’s “story” (17).
The speaker of this poem is a great vehicle for empathy and social awareness, particularly when confronting the topic of negative emotions. The poem is visually expressive in the traditional sense when considering stanza structure: 5 stanzas, each with semi-symmetrical attributes. The occasional jagged lines in each of the stanzas give the overall visual appearance a lot of character. Was this an intentional thing? I know it’s been an ordeal in the past, where line count has been an active or problematic attribute, how did you fare with line count in this piece?
Thanks again for sharing, and I look forward to our next writing exercise!
-Tara