Day: September 9, 2015

Belfast Confetti

Belfast Confetti is quite a strongly written poem. It sound like the author is trying to put you in the middle of a riot where you feel there is no escape from. The poem is about a riot in Belfast in which Protestants used scrap metal objects as missiles in anti-Catholic protests. The Poem tells me that the people in the riots must have been very scared and felt trapped, so this makes me think about how scared people must’ve been in this situation. One of the main quotes from the poem is “And the explosion, an asterisk on the map.” This explains that at some point during the riot there was an explosion that (in a certain sense) shook the map. Ciarán Carson was the Irish poet that wrote this poem. He won the Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Poetry award for this poem.

Flag

Flag, the poem, had a strong impact on me as I was all about how a simple flag can signify so much. Countries can be torn apart just from a piece of cloth, and countries can unify just from a piece of cloth. The white flag is a symbol of a country surrendering in a war, while a raised British flag means they have won the war. The poem has a strong sound to it, and it also has a strong meaning. The poem explains many different situations, such as; what’s that unfurling on a pole? It’s just a piece of cloth that makes the guts of men grow bold. This is referring to soldiers looking at their nation’s flag, and making them have a strong sense of pride that they are fighting for their country. The poem has five stanzas, each with three lines. The middle line is shorter than the other two lines in the stanza. It is in this form because in old medieval times, flags used to be shaped like this. Some of the strong words in the poem are; bold, unfurling, rising, flying, nation to its knees, makes the guts of men grow bold and there are many more. The author of the poem, John Agard, says that this poem represents how national symbols bind nations together, but also drives people apart. Agard grew up in British Guyana and was taught all about British history, but Guyana was nothing like Britain. This explains why he feels that Flags drive people apart, because he may have been from British Guyana, but he never learned about his own country’s history.