Straairway To Heaven Poem Analysis

I am writing to you as a sophomore at the Urban School of San Francisco which is located right in the Haight/Ashbury neighborhood, famous for the Summer of Love which I’ve noticed you mentioned in some of your poems including “Staff SGT. Metz”. I have lived all my (short) life in San Francisco which has both been interesting and felt claustrophobic at times.

Before I found your poems, I wasn’t so into poetry in generally didn’t enjoy writing poems. However, when I came upon your poem “Break”, I couldn’t help but fall in love with it. Picturing “the child / [circling] her room, impatient / with her blossoming, tired / of the neat house, the made bed, / the good food” brought out so many emotions for me from the common struggle of putting together

I loved the line, “We nod in agreement, then settle again / into our separate worlds” because I feel as if I am in the car and experiencing the drive along with you. Somehow you conveyed such complex emotions with into only a few words. In “Stairway to Heaven” although you three are all in the same car, experiencing the same movements, each perspective draws upon the “separate worlds” you feel a part of during the drive. Do you go through your everyday life looking for beauty and mystery in everything or does it come to you naturally and then write it down? Is there anything that influenced you or made you look through life with observation lenses instead of being the one to talk? I felt so connected to your drive that I decided to write my own variation called “Lua” about the drive that I often take with my family up to

Metz”, your first poem in The Book of Men, you keenly observe a stranger at the airport. I admire how you created a whole story for this man beyond his initial appearance. About the man which the poem was focused on you said, “I noticed him and he was beautiful… I knew nothing about him… only his name” and yet you “felt very close to him.” Stemming from this small encounter, the poem seamlessly digs into your own experience with your brother, war and love. I appreciate the way in which this poem begins with Metz and then turns personal as if somehow you are living through Metz and allowing him to be the actor who then verbalizes and brings to light your own emotions. In the poem you describe Metz when you say, “He’s more real to me now / than my brother was to me then” which says a lot about the human condition and how personal connections are complex. I have met some people who I instantly feel drawn to while others I may have known them forever but they are still a mystery. Balancing the known and the unknown, the tangible and the abstract is a skill that I see in this poem. You wrote, “I was a girl torn between love and the idea of love”, which further captures the difficulties of our supposed desires which we may know nothing about. Ideas are different from actions and bridging the two worlds can be a