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Adversity In Obligations Two By Layli Long Soldier

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The elements of poetry are meant to be used as a way to connect the reader's mind to a certain idea or concept. Frequently, when poets write about adversity, they speak of the struggle they went through and overcome it with great optimism. However, Layli Long Soldier chose to truly express her adversity by allowing the complexities of grief to shine through her work. Her powerful elegy reveals that grieving is a profoundly personal experience that is also bonded to the universal human condition. In her contemporary piece 'Obligations 2', Long Soldier uses poetic form, anaphoras, and figurative language to support the message that grief is a collective experience that holds several journeys toward confronting it. Although this disorderly piece of art does not have a rhyme scheme nor maintain the normal structure of a poem, this purposefully leaves the reader room for …show more content…

If read from top right to bottom right, the phrase is shown: "As we embrace the future we work to understand the grief we shift into light across our faces" (1-9). In contrast, if we read from the top left to the bottom left, we read the phrase: "As we resist the past we fail to question the grief we bury as ash across our faces” (1-9). The visual shape of the words reinforces this sense of diverging trajectories, with the lines splaying out in opposite directions. There are a plethora of parallels in this piece that give the audience an understanding of the different paths a grieving person may journey through. Long Soldier leaves deliberate spaces to represent the silences and emotional gaps that can accompany loss. Furthermore, the rebellious nature of the poem emphasizes the chaos that comes with the grieving process and the unpredictable character of human

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