Among the defining attributes of ‘personhood’ is, I think, ‘creativity’. I thought I’d offer a post by my youngest son, Daniel (14). Here’s a portion of a school report he recently did on a Cisneros poem. I thought it captured something beautiful, something I’ve been chasing, something I hope to spend the rest of my life studying and getting better at: creativity.

Without further ado, I give you Daniel Belt:

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In the poem “Cloud,” Sandra Cisneros uses imagery to...

...express the endless freedom a cloud represents. Cisneros writes “You were the sky without a hat.” A hat covers something; it brings closure to whatever it covers. It symbolizes limit. The saying “the sky has no limit” expresses this imagery. When she writes the sky has no hat, she is saying that the sky does indeed have no limit, that it is endless in its possibilities. The clouds cover the sky, but they do not contain it. You can go even higher than the clouds. Using the metaphor of the sky not having a hat gives us the image that we do not have to be limited by the hat on whatever our “sky” might be.

Cisneros also writes, “You were the wind in the wheels of a red bicycle.” This line expresses through imagery how we all have something that drives us forward and beyond. We all have a “wind” that pushes our own bicycle forward to our goal. It is our motivation, what keeps us going, what pushes us forward and keeps us striving for the sky with no hat. The sky is our goal in the sense that it is endless in all directions, but the wind is what keeps us flying. The wind is what keeps us reaching farther and farther until we’ve grasped our goal in our own endless sky.

The last paragraph in the poem ties everything together through her use of even more beautiful imagery. Cisneros writes “when you opened your wings to the wind, across the punched-tin sky above a prison courtyard, those condemned to death and those condemned to life watched how smooth and sweet a white cloud glides.” When we open up to our wind, our motivation, we are pushed forward. We glide like a perfect cloud in the sky as we reach for our goal. The words “Those condemned to death and those condemned to life in a prison courtyard” describe the people who are trapped in a world of limiting boundaries. They are trapped in a prison and cannot understand the concept of an endless sky of freedom. They cannot grasp the idea of opening their wings to the wind and letting it drive them forward into the sky where anything is possible.

Post Edited (Tom) : 4/5/2008 6:48:23 AM (GMT-5)

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