What Will Your Verse Be? Pub 5

     Poetry can be used to convey a wide array of  emotions and situations in unique ways. The poems that we will be looking at in this paper all deal with love and heartbreak but it's interesting how each poet was able to convey the same theme in three different ways with the use of  different tones, analogies and settings.

     In the poem "Footprint on Your Hear", by Gary Lenhart,  the speaker is taking about how there are certain people that will come into your life and "leave a footprint on your heart". They go on to compare this heartbreak to a harsh winter and use imagery to allow the reader to better understand what they are trying to say. They compare the process of letting go and moving on to that of taking off "encrusted boots, children’s mittens,Scratchy scarves" in the sense that we "linger to unwrap

or ready yourself for rough exits". The speaker in this poem seems to have recently gone through heartbreak and is having a hard time moving past it. When the speaker says "So that when you meet someone who is leaving your life you will be able to wave stiff  icy mitts.....A chill so numbing you strew the heart’s antechamber with layers of rural garble," they seem to be hopeful that if someone else comes into their life, the print of the shoe will lessen and they will be able to move on. Some words to describe the tone of this poem would be miserable, gloomy yet hopeful because of how depressingly they compare their past love to a harsh winter yet they are hopeful that when they do move on things will be better.

    In the second poem "Poet of an Ordinary Heartbreak" ,by Chris Abani, the speaker compares love and heartbreak to that of a knife and the pain of heartbreak to that of cutting a tomato. One could even argue that the tomato represents a heart. "An ordinary knife cutting ordinary tomatoes on

an ordinary slab of wood on an ordinary Wednesday." could be a commenting on how heartbreak is something that is ordinary and a part of love, something that we don't necessarily have to dwell on it yet we do. From this analogy  we can gather that the setting for this poem is a kitchen and the speaker is comparing love to a knife as they cook a meal. As brief as this poem is they spend most of it talking about this knife, love, and how we have "been tempted by the sharp edge of a knife" only to move on "to the meat stewing on the stove". This moving on from cutting the tomato with the knife  to the meat on the oven represents moving on from a past love and heartbreak and just moving on with one's life.

   In my own poem "Ocean" I, similar to the previous poets, talk about heartbreak, how it affects our emotions. To add some context to my piece I wrote this poem sometime in high school after a guy I liked and had been seeing for a few weeks. A day later I had to write a poem for English so I decided to write about my first heartbreak.  The tone of this piece is very somber as I compared the feeling of falling in love and the eventual breakup to that of falling in love with the ocean only to realize how destructive it is. In the beginning it really did feel like "I had gazed upon a beautiful ocean as the sun sets", completely ignoring just how unpredictable and harmful the ocean could really be.

    All three of these poems talk about love and heartbreak in different yet effective ways. No matter what the theme is or what a poet wants to convey there are many different ways to do so and they are all interesting and valid in their own right. Poetry may seem very limiting but in truth the sky truly is the limit in how one can express their emotions in a way that is relatable yet fresh in terms of how it is being expressed.