Help analyzing poem?

"Mother dear, may I go downtown


Instead of out to play,


And march the streets of Birmingham


In a Freedom March today?"





"But, mother, I won't be alone.


Other children will go with me,


And march the streets of Birmingham


To make our country free."





"No, baby, no, you may not go,


For the dogs are fierce and wild,


And clubs and hoses, guns and jails


Aren't good for a little child."





She has combed and brushed her night-dark hair,


And bathed rose petal sweet,


And drawn white gloves on her small brown hands,


And white shoes on her feet.





The mother smiled to know that her child


Was in the sacred place,


But that smile was the last smile


To come upon her face.





"No, baby, no, you may not go,


For I fear those guns will fire.


And sing in the children's choir."





"No, baby, no, you may not go,


For I fear those guns will fire.


And sing in the children's choir."





For when she heard the explosion,


Her eyes grew wet and wild.


She raced through the streets of Birmingham


Calling for her child.





She clawed through bits of glass and brick,


Then lifted out a shoe.


"O, here's the shoe my baby wore,


But, baby, where are you?"

Help analyzing poem?
I've never heard it, but wonder if it was written about the Birmingham church bombing?





Edit:


It's referenced in the "remembrances" part of the Wikipedia article as being the poem "The Ballad of Birmingham" by Dudley Randall.


There was no safe place at that time for people involved in the Civil Rights Movement.





Read the Wiki article - you need to be informed about this if you are too young to remember!


If you know what the poem is about, you can analyze it for yourself instead of having someone tell you what it means.
Reply:The attachment of parents to their children. The horrors of war and fighting.
Reply:I think you're missing a line in this stanza:





"No, baby, no, you may not go,


For I fear those guns will fire.


And sing in the children's choir."





... because it seems that this is a poem that tells a story about a mother who would not let her child go with her to march in a Civil Rights demonstration in the streets of Birmingham (Alabama) -- and sent the child to church instead. During that era, there was one particularly bad church bombing (when African-Americans were fighting to end segregation and win their civil rights) -- in that church bombing several children were killed. So this mother who thought she kept her child safe, away from the street demonstrations, lost her child in the place she'd thought the girl would be safe.





This is NOT an analysis of the poem, by the way. This just explains to you the story the poem tells. Depending on the question your teacher asked, you'll need to think about the poem to analyze it further.
Reply:The poem tells a simple story. Don't make too much of it.


A girl wants to go on a civil rights march, but her mother won't let her.


She goes anyway.


The mother finds the shoe of her child in a building that has been destroyed on account of the march.


But the mother doesn't find her child.
Reply:The white gloves and all that suggest going to church. The mother wants her child to go to church instead of downtown because she believes it's safer there. However, she was wrong and her daughter was killed by a bomb. It's about the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church Bombing.





It was a bombing on an African-American church in Birmingham, Alabama in the U.S. by the KKK.



accessories belts