Week Five - Response to Emmanuel's "Mother to Daughter"

Mother to Daughter

Why did you leave
this house at that hour?
To meet a boy? Which boy?
What boy? Talk to me.
Don't lie to me, young lady!
John? John who? Thomas?
And, where did you go? Where?
What did you do?
What? Really? How long?
And, then what? I said what?
No, no, no! You are
in so much trouble!
Grounded for a week.
No, month.
No--Just go
to your room!

I loved that poem, too. Your choice of subject matter reminds me a ton of a poem I read a few years ago and it's going to drive me crazy becuase I can't recall the name of it or enough with coherence to google it, but I'll try to remember and post it on here later.

Anyway, as for your actual peice: the subject matter is familiar to every one--which makes the simple language "okay." Starting as "No, no, no," however, it loses some of its appeal and I can't pinpoint exactly why. What I can say, however, is that I remember being intruiged by her peice because of the way it made an innocent bystander become both victim and aggressor--as though it was this person's fault that these terrible things happened to them. Your peice, however, leaves little ability to make that same connection just because in a parent/child situation like this, the child is typically the one that's at fault. I would try to play up DuBrow's technique a bit more--maybe, even, by titling the peice as the real and excusable reason the daughter is late--the reason she can't actually tell her mom.