Blog assignment - post four lines from a poem and critique it the way you want to be critiqued

From What They're Doing by Dan Albergotti

What they’re doing

They’re carrying a cross before them like a scythe.
They’re entering holy cities in armored personnel carriers.
They’re accomplishing missions, declaring victory,
Saying amen, amen, meaning so be it, so be it. And so it is.

Notes:

These four lines make up the end of the poem and are very tight in terms of craft. The first seven lines of the poem are not so tightly formed and can be read as captured moments, things that have happened. This part of the poem builds a lot of momentum before cutting itself short and ending with a line that feels like running headlong into a wall.

The last four lines stood out for me in terms of form because of the repetition in the beginning of each line and the syntactical parallels between the three lines leading to the end. The form draws attention to these lines in particular like a road sign that says: look at this! and feel the weight of the words. Beginning each line with “they’re” indicates to the reader that there is an importance to the things that “they’re” doing.

Furthermore, the last four lines of this poem begin with an action, “they’re” doing something, and the lines are building urgency. First they do this, then they do this, then they do something else, each action builds on the previous, informing the statement before it. “They” carry the cross like a scythe, into holy cities in personnel carriers, accomplishing missions, declaring victory. The image of the scythe is immediately violent because it is a blade used to harvest (obviously), combining this with the image of the cross adds a sort of righteousness to the statement that carries into the following lines. A holy harvest in a holy city, the conquest and victory of the righteous; one line informs the next.

Still, one should also note that tension is created in the second line of the excerpt with the words “personnel carriers” which implies a sense of detachment from the righteous harvest, the culling of the fold as it were. The words “personnel carrier” bring the reader to a place where one considers war and conquest separate from people hurting others, they are not people they are “personnel”. Which lends to the tension in the following line between the very personal religious “mission” and the sense of the word “mission” in a war. This is also example of one line informing the next.

Finally, the last line of the poem cuts the rolling “armored personnel carriers” and the march of war by doing two things: the first is breaking form, and the second is by changing the action (the verb) from a physical collaborative action, to a deeply personal one. The break in the form creates a stop, both visually and when read out loud. However, instead of taking away from the level of importance by switching forms, it adds to it by once again drawing the reader’s attention to it. The verb is not introduced with “they’re,” it is thrust onto the reader as an overarching action that is not sequential but rather constant. This line informs all of the lines before it, the action in the last line permeates the rest of the poem. Not only is the form cut short, but the poem doubles back on itself by having the last line inform the reading of all of the lines before it. I consider this in the same way that I would consider the final couplet in a sonnet. The line brings the poem to a close and puts the rest of the poem into perspective, in this case on a visceral level. I think this is achieved through the word “Amen” which is a personal affirmation in meditation and not necessarily an outward action that affects others; in combination with the words “so it is”. This line juxtaposes the ideas of personal influence with physical force and implies that one informs the other, which, I think, was the point of the poem.

-Lupe