#6

"APO 96225" reminded me a lot of TTTC, but it wasn't just because of the Vietnam thing. It seems like the two works have a similar purpose. In TTTC when Kiowa's sister doesn't wrote back to Rat, the reader sees civilians' stance on the war. The purpose of "APO 96225" is the same. The poem shows that civilians cared about soldiers and the war, but they preferred that the truth about the war stay separate from their perception of it. The boy's mother wants to know about the war throughout the entire poem. She even worries when her son doesn't tell her about everything that's happening, but when he tells her the truth, she can't handle it. The mother represents the average civilian in America during the war. They wanted their own ideas of Vietnam to cover the truth about what happened to soldiers so that they wouldn't have to deal with the accompanying pain.

#6

The central theme of "Dream Deferred" is annoyance with the circumstances of the time period (1930s and '40s) in relation to civil rights. The dream to which the poets is most likely referring is the dream of racial equality. The metaphors he uses in the poems describe different ways that the issue of civil rights could be handled by the country. He begins with several scenarios which could result from waiting to act on people's feelings about civil rights, all of which are bad, but they're not the worst. The second to last stanza describes the current situation with civil rights. It's weighing on the people like a heavy load. The last line describes the worst case scenario by relating it to an explosion. Violence is this worst case scenario.