Dedications

I have chosen to write about Rich's last poem, "Dedications," from "An Atlas of the Difficult World." Honestly I don't have a whole lot to say about it, other than that I just really liked this poem. I liked how she was writing directly to the reader, as if she knew them personally, or at least well enough to know what they were doing as they read. More than that, I liked that I could very easily picture each scenario that she came up with, even though they were all very different from one another. I think my favorite scenario was the older man or woman, reading the poem "through your failing sight," (line 26) because I loved that image of an elderly person squinting through his or her thick glasses, refusing to stop reading because, as Rich says, "even the alphabet is precious" (line 28).
Thinking about this poem in the sense of "ordinary" and "unordinary," the entire thing is both or either, depending on the person reading it. To me, it is unordinary to think of myself pacing back and forth with a crying child on my shoulder as I read, but to any mother or father, that is as ordinary to them as waking up in the morning. Ordinariness in this poem changes from person to person, and all depends on the situations that those people find themselves in.