Let them be as flowers, Always watered, fed, guarded, admired,
But harnessed to a pot of dirt.

Explain why you believe this Stanza is so powerful.

Polanco’s poem draws a dichotomy between “flowers” which have exchanged their freedom for human care and love (“watered, fed, guarded, admired / but harnessed to a pot of dirt”) with the wild weeds, which are not beautiful, but are alive in the world (“To have broken through the surface of stone / to live, to feel exposed to the madness / of the vast, eternal sky”). There are several ways you can think about this split—the wild vs. the domesticated, the free vs. the enslaved, the rugged individual vs. society, the genuine vs. the artificial. I think the message of the poem, however, has to do with freedom of expression and the need to be independent of corrupting social influences (the “greedy, human hands”). Although the reality of being a weed may “smell of musty green stench,” there is a kind of beauty in freedom that the flowers lack.

Explanation:

There ❤️❤️

to inform the reader that the text will take a second look at the grimms’ original tales

no