Blessing the Boats Chapter Summary & Analysis - From next (1988), "my dream about being white" Summary

From next (1988), "my dream about being white" Summary

This poem has the quality of a dream with disconnected images, passages of feelings, strange connections. For example, it begins with "hey music," as a recognition of music playing suddenly in the dream. She hears music and sees herself, only as a white person, and she sees her hair not her regular color but a "flutter" the color of autumn leaves, which would be yellow or red or orange. She has a perfect nose and "no lips/no behind," all of these stigmas of black appearance, the nose, the lips, and the wide bottom. The poet adds that in addition to all these physical characteristics, in the typical fashion of dreams, she is wearing, metaphorically, history as seen from the point of view of white people.

She must wake up, at least partially, because she realizes that wearing white history has no future, not for her, so she takes off the...
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