Leah Nagle - Week 3 - Pick a Poet (Rachel Long) - "Portent"

For my poetry blog post this week, I decided on a poem called, “Portent” by Rachel Long. Long is a leader of Octavia - Poetry Collective for Women of Color, located in Southbank Center, London. I enjoy her poems because she incorporates her culture and life experience, being a woman of color, into her poems. This makes her poems personal and deep. 

In “Portent,” one of the main aspects that Long brings up is the idea of social class. She claims that it takes, “three hundred years, about thirteen generations, to change your social class” (lines 8-9) and because of this, she feels trapped. Since she is a woman of color, it seems to me that she is attempting to express her frustration with lacking the opportunities other’s have just because of her identity. 


Although the world has begun to shift towards giving everyone equal opportunities and rights, it is still a relevant issue that has not been properly solved yet. It breaks my heart that some people are not able to achieve what they desire just because of how they were born. 


To escape her reality and any pain she is feeling, Long writes about how she dreams of “hearing laughter in the garden” (line 5) and seeing children play. When we daydream, we can imagine anything, there are no limitations, so it makes sense that Long is daydreaming to escape how she is feeling. 


Do you ever daydream to forget something that is bothering you? If so, what do you like to dream about?



Citations


https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/156823/portent 

http://poetrysociety.org.uk/poets/rachel-long/ 

Comments

  1. AnonymousSeptember 19, 2022 at 11:30 AM

    This poignant poem gives light to the struggles many members of society face. I am privileged that my highest aspirations, of being successful, rich, and happy, are something that I can achieve, although this is not true for everyone. It is extremely depressing that a person's goals may be hopeless to them from the moment they were born. A dream of mine is that in the future, hopefully before the 300 years that Long noted in the poem, anyone can achieve their passions despite what they look like or who they are.

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