Feb 4

Today we were tasked with picking out 3 entries in the Tocqueville poem and 1 entry not in the poem to share with the class.  After some time I finally found 3 I liked.  And, my group members found the ones they liked and we shared amongst  one another.

I like one poem on pages 28/29 about how his friend was making his friend was doing wrong and how he feels guilty for not noticing and says he feels he betrayed his friends.  I don't understand why he feels responsible for his friends crime.  His friend is the perpetrator not him.  But it goes on to say that his friend's father passed and I suppose that he feels he was not there when his friend turned to crime to vent or something.

I also liked the one on pages 28/29 about how a group of bandits killed this mans wife and gave him an ultimatum to either kill himself or his young child.  And in the end he kills his child and the bandits chop off both his arms.  This type of poem seems to repeat in the book a number of times.  But personally I do not agree with the actions that the fathers took.  My classmates feel that the father was sparing the child from the whatever the bandits would have done to the child.  But in the end he killed his child, I would've told my child to be strong and would've just ended my life there.  The child deserves a chance to live.  I pray I never find myself in such a situation.

I also liked one on pages 30/31.  About how these people don't have photos of their family or themselves and they talk about themselves or their family.  I can relate to this because I don't talk about myself or my family because people don't ask or just don't seem to care.  The final poem I chose from the book is Ecclesiates because I liked how it was structured.  It has 2 sentences in each stanza that seem to talk about charity or some sort of virtue.  One of the sentences talks about why we think we do it and the other why we really did it.