Response to Poetry Final Draft

I chose the poem "Possum Crossing" by Nikki Giovanni and I feel that the poem has meaning to life in the fact that we mistake some things for what they're really not. The thesis of this poem is that things can be confusing and hard to understand, and sometimes easy to mistake something for something else. The poem starts off as a woman is driving her car down the road and she sees what she believes to be a possum. The woman thinks about all the times that she has come close to hitting something with her car, whether it be an animal, or some trash. She thinks of the time when she is driving and she almost hits an small animal that is running away from a cat that is Line #4 "Toying With It's Life,". The animal did not make it away from the cat. The woman is also frusturated that people don't take the time to care and watch out for little innocent animals in the wild, such as the possom. There are quite a few literary elements in this poem, but I will only focus on three. The first one that I noticed was that there was a sense of personification in a way about the possum. It relates to life itself and how our judgement gets clouded in the heat of things. Like how in the poem, Giovanni shows that in the moment, the driver doesn't think clearly and assumes that the possum is an actual possum, when it is nothing more than a leaf. This shows how fast we jump to a conclusion, and how much better it would be for us to think things through before we do them. The second key literary element is imagery. There was a lot of imagery in this poem. How Nikki describes the leaf at the end of the poem, and how it is "struggling . . . to lift itself into the wind and live" and how the birds are "living kin of dinosaurs think themselves invincible and pay no heed to the rolling wheels while they dine on an unlucky rabbit" I think the imagery really goes to show the detail in the poem and helps you imagine how the narrator thinks and feels when she almost hits the