Powerful

Let me start off with this poem was long and confusing. That said, I found it very interesting. The imagery Brooks uses bring some profound pictures to mind, such as the newspaper rugs. Every day there is a new rug, each with a new headline. How could a place be so poor that they use newspapers as rugs? The things we take for granted, these families would beg for. Grease stains on the wall, and little children clinging to their mother’s aprons in the hallway.

I can picture in my mind babies clad in diapers worn the day before. The ladies walking down the hallway trying not to get any of the filth on their perfectly clean dresses.

The residents of this slum are so dirt-poor, so disgusting, that the ladies from the Ladies Betterment League are reluctant to give them the clean money they raised for these families. They want to find a more “worthy” poor family. The not-so-poor poor.

In the poem, they ask if there’s a way to just mail the money to the families that are so desperately in need of it, so that they don’t actually have to look at the unsightly apartments. If they could just mail the money, then they can say, “Oh, WE donated to these poor families, because that’s how wonderful we are.” Then they don’t have to know how badly off these people really are.

The money they were going to give them would have helped them a great deal, but they need REAL help. The kind that can get them a decent meal every day, and education for their children.