260.) The Sad Children's Song (Grace Paley)

(pg. 319)

This house is a wreck said the children
when they came home with their children
Your papers are all over the place
The chair are covered with books
and look  brown leaves are piled on the floor
under the wandering Jews

Your face is a wreck said the children
when they came home with their children
There are lines all over your face
your necks like curious turtles
Why did you let yourself go?
Where are you going without us?

This world is a wreck said the children
When they came home with their children
There are boms all over the place
There's no water  the fields are all poisoned
Why did you leave things like this
Where can we go said the children
what can we say to our children?

Paley's poem uses a combination of repetition and imagery to create a vivid vision of a disheveled and damaged world and individual and artfully shows how time and pain can wear down a person and age them.  The Sad Children's Song appears to take place during World War II, and more specifically, the Holocast. The imagery of the house being torn apart, searching for prosecuted refugees, shows the violence that occured there. The children repeatedly say that something "is a wreck" (1, 7, 13) shows how children during this time period were not ignorant and were more mature and grown up beyond their years, which in itself, is a tragedy underlying an even greater tragic event. These children grew up in a period of corruption, violence, and were exposed so often to death and dispair. The last two lines of the poem are powerful rhetorical questions of children asking their parents where they can go to be safe, and of parents wondering what they can tell their children to take away their pain and suffering and give them a better life. 

I felt that this was an incredibly powerful poem, capturing tastefully in very few words, the sadness and pain that children in this time period faced and making it tangible to readers. It beautifully depicts how war changes everyone, even the smallest child who is not as oblivious as everyone thinks, and shows how it painfully changes one's outlook on the world and others, and how it physically changes. It wears on one and leaves them older than their years, although they have already aged quicker than others because wartime children had to grow up then, and later are ancient artificats and survivors of a holocaust of their own. It was not just the Jews who suffered horrible ordeals, although the one that they suffered was incredibly horrific and savage.