"Between the World and Me"

“Between the World and Me” by Richard Wright was a graphic poem about a man who was murdered and his soul left his body. I could picture it in my mind of how time turned back and he could see how he died. It was like a movie flashback. At first he was having fun, drinking and smoking, and by the end of the night he was a pile of bones and ashes. It was interesting how at first it seems like the narrator found a pile of ashes while walking in the woods, but by the end of the poem you realize that he was looking at what had been his own body. It wasn’t until I had read the poem again that I finally understood what had actually happened. The narrator kept referring to his blood as “black blood” and described how he had been hot tar and feather, then burned alive. It seems like he was a black man who had been attacked by white men who tarred and feathered him. The scene probably took place in the south then, where those events were more common when blacks and whites were segregated. To me this poem was very moving because at first glance it is just a poem of a man being killed, but it’s in the details and individual words that you finally realize exactly what kind of event had happened.