This poem spoke to me immediately, starting with the title. Growing up I had two very loving parents who saw eye to eye most of the time. However, there were occasions when they would argue or fight, and those moments were scary for me and they left a strong and lasting impact. The poem even mentions a brother “standing in the hall against the wall with my little brother”, which was exactly my situation. In fact, often my brother and I would take sides with our parents in arguments. So as I read a line like “blown like leaves against the wall by their voices” I was taken right back to the emotion of those moments where you could hear the air - absolute silence - in between the yelling. This line spoke to me because in those moments of parents arguing, it was like my breath was yanked from me and like I was pushed away from them - slammed outside the door, kind of like blown leaves.
Now that I’ve read the poem a bunch of times, I really have come to appreciate what the poet, Ruth Whitman, is doing with imagery. She packs this poem with amazing similes, including the one I mentioned above. One that really stands out is when she describes her head “like a pingpong ball between the paddles of their anger”. What an image! I really get the idea of being smashed back and forth as you watch the two people you love so much arguing back and forth. You want to jump in and help, but their “paddles of anger” keep hitting you. That final line about “paddles of anger” also really adds a lot to the simile, because it gets into the raw emotion of the moment.
A final poetic element that Ruth Whitman used effectively for me was the personification in the line “I heard the claws of the rain pounce”. Rain is often soft and gentle, but a rain that comes with the anger of a quarrel would be sharp and painful. Therefore, the claws imagery works really well to remind me of the emotions I felt in those times.
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