Poverty - Love Song VIII
In the poem, the speaker walks around a random street at night, observing what happens nearby. This speaker is acutely aware of the poverty around them, watching a homeless boy play pranks and a poor man wandering around. In contrast to those still up, the speaker poses those people already in bed, clean and ignorant of what goes on at night.
Uncertain and Scary Future – Love Song IX
In the poem, the speaker ponders about a potential wedding with their loved one. They describe the wedding, subsequent wedding night and the birth of a child in a demonstratively profane and ridiculing vocabulary, showing a certain disdain for all of it.
The underlying tone of this disdain however appears to be a fear of an uncertain and scary future which is revealed in the last stanza of the poem. The speaker describes their unborn child as a fragile butterfly that will just show them how bad the world really is every day by getting hurt again and again.
Destiny – Love Song VI
In the brief poem, the speaker personifies joy as a bird that needs to be left alone to fly where it wants to go. Happiness, so the speaker, is therefore not determined by one’s actions but solely by destiny, which chooses who to go to based on motivations humans cannot understand and should not try to direct.
Creation – Brancusi’s Golden Bird
The poem describes a work of art by the sculptor Brancusi in loving and very explicit detail. The speaker likens the artist to a lesser God who shaped metal into a divine form and thus created life in a way. The statue, shaped in the form of a feather, is describes in minute detail, and the process of creating it is likened to the creation of life.
Not only does the speaker see the process of creating the statue similar to new life being born, they liken it to the immaculate conception of Jesus Christ and are thus comparing the creation of art to that of God.
