The Bean Eaters

We will discuss this poem during week two.  Please read it and think about the specific examples the author provides and the specific examples supplied by your own imagination.  Take a moment to think about the mental picture the poem creates.  Jot down some notes about the appearance of the room, the people, and anything else that appears in your mind.

The Bean Eaters
by Gwendolyn Brooks
They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair. Dinner is a casual affair. Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood, Tin flatware. Two who are Mostly Good. Two who have lived their day, But keep on putting on their clothes And putting things away. And remembering . . . Remembering, with twinklings and twinges, As they lean over the beans in their rented back room that is full of beads and receipts and dolls and cloths, tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes.

The Red Wheelbarrow
by William Carlos Williams
so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.

"Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio"

Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio

by James Wright 

In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.

Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other's bodies.

Link to poem: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15590

Hands

by Jean Sprackland

She peels cod fillets off the slab,
dips them in batter, drops them
one by one into the storm of hot fat.
I watch her scrubbed hands,
elegant at the work,

and think of the hands of the midwife
stroking wet hair from my face as I sobbed and cursed,
calling me sweetheart and wheeling in more gas,
hauling out at last my slippery fish of a son.
He was all silence and milky blue. She took him away
and brought him back breathing,
wrapped in a white sheet. By then
I loved her like my own mother.

I stand here speechless in the steam and banter,
as she makes hospital corners of my hot paper parcel.

Link to poem: http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/2007/07/09/070709po_poem_sprackland#ixzz117D7Hha6