"Unveiling" Poetry Response

Unveiling

In the cemetery
a mile away
from where we used to live
my aunts and mother,
my father and uncles lie
in two long rows almost the way
they used to sit around
the long planked table
at family dinners.
And walked beside
the graves today, down
one straight path
and up the next,
I don't feel sad
for them, just left out a bit
as if they kept
from me the kind
of grown-up secret
they used to share
back then, something
I'm not quite ready yet
to learn.
                     -Linda Pastan

The vocabulary within this poem is simple and understandable, giving the idea that the message behind it is what's important. As a child, I can remember sitting at the dinner table with all of my adult family members. Every once in a while they would lower their voices to each other, whispering things that were not for my ears. I felt left out when this happened. I wanted to desperately know what was passing between their lips that I, with all my straining, could not hear. The urge to understand was so strong.

Ironically, now that I am older and am allowed the chance to hear the once hushed sentences, I don't want too. They are often negative and cause stress, adult things.

 " . . . just left out a bit as if they kept from me the kind of grown-up secret they used to share back then . . ." (Back then referring to the dining room table.) Pastan compares these feeling with her family's death. As she is walking past their graves she does not feel said but left out. " . . . I don't feel sad for them, just left out a bit . . . " Death is something that is truly and utterly unknown until it happens. The moment you die you must understand the meaning behind it and what happens after it, hopefully. Pastan expresses how she is not ready to learn it yet because of her younger age and I think I can say, how the secrets learned that where once hushed at the dinner table where not as great as I expected, death will also be.

The structure of the poem is different. The poem consists of one long stanza's with odd breaks and commas in between. The poem can be read as one long thought, one long memory. To much structure, I believe, would ruin the "memory" of the poem, if that makes any sense. The commas were places so to add  to the "run-on" feeling and emphasize on the strong thought.

P.S. Let me know, Mrs. White, if my responses are getting to short! :)