Journal Five

The first poem that really caught my eye was Coral's "Depression Speaks Light on the Tree". Personally I love all of Coral's poems and they always tend to hit home with me. She uses a language rather different from a lot of the other poems that I've seen. Coral uses christmas lights to explain her family members and certain emotions that she's feeling or that she notices around her. I feel as though using the christmas lights as a metaphor for emotions and people really allowed me to connect to the poem more. When Coral read this poem aloud I instantly had goosebumps. The thing I love about when she reads her poems is that she hold nothing back, she lets all of her emotion come through the poem and I believe it makes it so much more effective to the reader/listener. The meaning of the poem just showed the feelings that Coral had been going through with her depression. She used the color green to describe a coward, the color red to describe anger, and the color blue to describe weak. When I was listening I instantly was thrown back to times where I've felt depressed about certain things in my life and it almost made me come to an understanding that things like depression can happen to anyone and that it effects everyone in a different way.

The second poem that I really enjoyed with Tyson's poem. For the first half of the poem I though that Tyson was writing about his brother in law that is currently staying with him and his family because he mentioned it right before he read the poem. Once he got to the end and made it clear to the listeners that his poem was about Mr. Frost aka winter I understood everything so much better. Tyson's use of metaphors throughout his poem really astounded me. My favorite was when he compared winter to being "like a rose stem no pedals just pricks". I loved how he wrote about how adults hate him and kids are too young and innocent to not like him even though he makes them sick. It was a wonderful connection to what winter is because winter makes a lot of problems for adults whereas kids always wanna go out and play. Tyson's use of language was unique and friendly.