A Life of Scrabbled Poems and a Puzzling Songs:

An Essay Connecting My Life, a Poem, and a Song

Jordan Crawford

Pine Point School

September 13, 2011

What do a poem a song and a life have in common? Well you are about to find out in this essay. The first step in identifying this relationship is to be able to notice the little connections. The poem will be by Langston Hughes, the song will be For a Dancer by Jackson Brown and the life will be my life. When we get started you may find that your life also relates to one of the three topics.
               My life as a shriveled raisin; now before you say think that this statement sounds weird think of the possibilities, because raisins ,in some ways, have links to my life. Sometimes, I’m sure; we have all felt like we are dehydrated grapes walking up an elevator that is meant for descending. For me this backwards elevator in life would be getting pets to keep, such as an adopted cat or a hedgehog. The main reason that I’m not allowed one of these two companions is that my room is referred to as a zoo, a term that was once true, but with three pets it is hardly what I would call a zoo, and this causes my dream to shrivel up like a raisin in the unforgiving sun and slide back down the elevator and start all over again. On a different note, during the summer it gets very hot and you start to feel clammy and raisin-like, as many of you know, and it can get uncomfortable to do much outside unless you have the luxury of a pool. The summers at my house are hot and make outside work or fun explosive like what a raisin in the sun might do. When I go outside I usually last thirty minutes before shrinking to a raisin and running rapidly back inside with flames licking my back; and this often deters me from outside when it is hot(alli.). Of course, as many of you know grapes are sweet, but also when a grape becomes a raisin it doesn’t lose that much of it’s sweetness. With that said my 8th grade class was one of those massive grapes with the seeds that are extremely sweet, but at the end of 8th grade it had ended up like a shrunken head other school dried up my friends. I learned over the past three weeks that even though we are a raisin we are still just as sweet. So in those simple ways my seldom mundane life and a raisin are actually alike in many ways, and possibly like yours too.
               When I first saw the lyrics of Jackson Brown’s song I first thought of it as a song of losses. This thought made it somewhat easier to write about since I knew of many sad things in my short life such as my guinea pigs death. My guinea pig was eight and a half years old and I was expecting him to live to a record age, in other words, I expected him to be around for things like high school, but when he died I was so bewildered that he was really gone that every day I would do routine things such as put fresh food in and change his bottle of water. In some cases I think I took him for granted, as I didn’t spend all the time I could with him, just as Jackson Brown had taken his wife being around for granted. On the other hand when the Twin Towers were hit America was startled as well as sad. For me it was strange for I was too little to understand what had happened until I was older and wiser. This is kind of like Jackson Brown, who couldn’t understand what had happened to his wife during his hectic life.(alli.)  Though this was bad no matter what happens in your life, good or bad, it happens for a reason. In the song “For a Dancer” Jackson Brown is trying to find out why his wife committed suicide but he can’t do anything to change it. Almost like a raisin in the sun, no matter what happens the raisin will soon dry up. Unlike a song life cannot be repeated the same way like a raisin is going to be eaten.
               After reading this you probably think this song and poem are all about sadness and losses. You can take it that way, but also remember that these to writers found a way of putting their sorrow and confusion in writing and songs for everyone to see. Jackson Brown did both as he put his questions and sorrows into his song. Sometime when you are feeling sad try putting your sadness into something that will relieve the stress.