Home by Robert Winner

My heart and my bones wince.
It's so damn sad-looking
and ugly, the Bronx--
driving past those small hills
blighted for miles with bleak
six-story desert-like apartment
buildings--the landscape I come from.
It's so damn ugly in its torment
of knifings and fires, I forget
I was happy there sometimes
in its damp and dingy streets, living my life
with the five continents of the world
in my mind's eye.

Maybe it was beautiful before us:
the coast with no landfill
a bluffed peninsula of swamps and forests,
a wilderness that became another wilderness
--beds and linoleum, school books,
musty hallways, laughter, despondency--
unremembering earth, a riverbed
millions flowed on, clinging breifly
to some masonry, then gone . . .

. . . . . . .


Winner uses very vivid imagery in his nostalgic poem. It caught my attention that the author's shortest sentence is also the first sentence. He immdediately catches a reader's attention by speaking personally of the way his body feels with such simple one-syllable words, "My heart and my bones wince". Many can connect with Winner because of the way he speaks so clearly of the streets he once roamed. Although not everyone can relate to the burden of a life he experienced, everything is brought together with the thought of, "Maybe it was beautiful before us". Winner triggers his readers with sympathy and finishes with a beautiful stanza of no breaks. I also found it interesting that his diction in the first stanza matches that of the situation and in the second stanza his gramma is more proficient now that he is referring to something beautiful. Throughout his whole poem Winner provides examples of how people have killed the beauty of nature and created a world that is such a struggle. By using the word "masonry" he implies that the growth away from such simplicity has created "a wilderness that became another wilderness". By "then gone" I get the impression that Winner thinks that this nature will soon be gone because of people and what they have done to the natural makings of the world.