A Gray Haze Over The Rice Fields (Poetry Blog #6)

I really enjoyed this poem when reading it as a piece of history. I think that it is about a kid being forced to lose his childhood and innocence because of events coinciding with his life.

I noticed that the first stanza is a description of what is going on and the second is more metaphorical.

The first couple of lines in stanza one are about the hard times, for example, "trucks going past the high road" and "kisses on my cheeks my long-dead grandmother gave me." I am a little unclear what the last two lines mean that says, "my mother didn't...closed door of her youth." I think that this means that his mother is confused on how the narrator is so different from her when she was a child and confused why he is not child-like anymore.

This is a stretch, but the second stanza kind of leads me to believe that he escapes suppression after he says "not that I wait for judgment..." and "a shadow freed from the past..." The second stanza also explains the title and "the shadow."

I know that when the author says, "...contains the footsteps of that childhood so light that I could only think of squirrels..." he means the lost childhood because of the rough times the narrator had to endure, that the only sweet part of his childhood was "squirrels slipping in and out of the mango trees."

I enjoyed this poem because it was bittersweet and sad but had great descriptions and images.

After interpreting this poem, I looked up background on the author and learned that he is Indian-American and was born in 1928. I think that this poem may have something to do with the British rule over India in the early 1900's.