On the eve of the execution by Jaime An Lim

There is something about this poem that instilled in me such a feeling of patriotism and love of country. The persona's words (let us assume he was being sincere) burned with a passion that made me remember the sort of proud romantic notion that came with sacrificing your life for your country. It seemed so noble, for someone to make such large sacrifices for their country, and I wondered what that sort of love must have felt. It must have felt wonderful to know that you were sacrificing to save your country, that you were making sacrifices for a greater cause. Sadly, it seems as if today, there is no longer so great a cause that can inspire such a passion in me.

Dedication by Czeslaw Milosz

A poem in honor of those who died in the Second World War or the Holocaust, Milosz talks about how poetry becomes useless when it cannot save those who need to be saved. I got the impression that the persona in the poem was undergoing some sort of personal turmoil, the understandable dilemma of those who survived the war. Again, the poem is sad in the sense that there is nothing anymore that the persona can do. He has survived and it has become both a gift and a burden to him. I saw the extents of the effect of the war, how it not only killed people and destroyed nations but warped people's principles and their outlook on life as well.

The summer I was sixteen by Geraldine Connolly

The fun and folly of youth is beautifully described in this poem. The words conjured up a perfect, ideal image of summer in my mind, filled with sun, friends and carefree fancies. Summers in my youth have always been a time of great fun and just letting go of everything that happened over the year. It's the time to forget the world and escape into your own happy place, where nothing can touch you and everything is just as you want them to be. These beautiful summers pass so quickly and before we know it, it is over, but all the while we still remember how we felt on that beautiful summer afternoon, feeling as if we were invincible, that summer would never end, and that we would never grow up.

The sad art of making paper by Ramon Sunico

The poem tells of the process of making paper and the sadness that comes with it. It speaks of the intertwined relationship of beauty and destruction, how sometimes we need to sacrifice something in order to make something else that is even greater. There was something about the words in the poem that seemed so wistful and sad. The words just flowed like a melancholic, yet beautiful song. It filled me with a sort of sadness but also a deeper appreciation of beauty. It made me feel that sometimes, beauty is made even more beautiful if there is a certain sadness or mystery to it.

The secretary chant by Marge Piercy

The poem evoked in me such a feeling of routine. I have always had this fear of being stuck in an office someday, doing such routine jobs that even my life is reduced to an errand. It made me wonder how it would feel to live such a life, where you have become almost an object. You are lowered to the level of the things you work with--Xerox machines, rubber bands and paper clips. It is as if the secretary in the poem has become an office supply as well. I did like, however, the use of metaphors in the poem and the imagery it projects.

Love After Love by Derek Walcott

"Love After Love" struck me as a sort of self-help poem about recovering after a relationship. It talks about loving yourself after all the drama that has passed. Often, after a messy break-up, people tend to go into a spiral of self-destruction. The poem talks about the opposite of that: taking care of yourself after a time of constantly giving to someone else. In order to move on and fall in love with another, we first have to learn how to love ourselves.

Pigtail by Tadeusz Rózewicz

I can gather from the poem that it is a sort of retelling of the tragedy of the Holocaust, only this time, focusing on the women's hair. It is as if it is told in a museum, the persona speculating about perhaps, the past life of the hair he/she is staring at in a museum. The last line tells of a "pigtail with a ribbon pulled at school by naughty boys." The Holocaust is often just a tragic incident in history, to be mourned and learned from. Sometimes, however, I forget that the Holocaust is not just a statistic. The mention of the pigatil at the end reminds me that all of the people in the concentration camps were very real, with very real experiences, and very real lives that were as real as I am now, writing this paragraph.