A quick analyis of the play "Child's Grave, Hale County, Alabama" by Jim Simmerman

This poem struck me with its vivid description of the hard life that people during the Depression suffered. This is not just a story of the burial of a child. This is a window into the hardships of a generation of people. The landscape is drawn as a harsh, barren land that chips away at plows. Poverty is blatant from the father having to steal the wood for the grave marker, to the mother sleeping …

…not for the world to see. It was for the father to know that though he could not give the child all it needed to survive, at least he could give him a proper burial. On a side note, this poem struck me because I feel that all too often we think our lives are so hard forgetting what past generations have gone through. Poems like this are a type of reality check for me.