Gasparillo remembered

The poem entitled “Gasparillo Remembered” by Anson Gonzales is a pantoum about an ex-slave reminiscing about the past and the experiences he has had on the sugar plantation and how they have changed. Anson uses imagery and figurative language to highlight the theme of change in his poem. The theme is developed gradually as Anson takes the readers on a step by step journey of life working on the sugar cane plantation to life free of the plantation and the experiences good and bad faced by the people who worked and lived in that era.
The poem describes the experience of the slaves that allows the readers to be thrown back into the past, the first two lines of the poem reflect the feelings of joy when the carts passes with the freshly cut sugar cane “rushed out when the carts passed with succulent stalks” expresses the happiness felt when seeing the cane stalks. That feeling is quickly lost by the next two lines as the poet describes the first instance of change, the change from soft sweet sugar cane to its hybrid form of beet sugar which broke teeth and the sorrow they felt when they were no longer able to eat and take from the passing carts. The next stanza describes the uses of the cane stalks to the slaves and how they were able to make pillows for them to rest at the beginning and end of the work day and they were also able to feed their hungry animals after working vigorously in the fields and factories “friends were tired with toil from the labors in the field and factory”. The poet describes the hardships of working on the plantation as an ex-slave and how hard it is to work while under contract and still look for a job, to make ends meet but despite all the hustle and bustle and work done the sugar cane was still profitable and the plantation owners became richer “but among the hustle and road dangers and sun scarred skin the sugared wallets bulged on payday”. The poem changes from the past to the present, to a life outside the cane fields and sugar