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Analysis Of Clint Smith's 'Playground Elegy'

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In Clint Smith’s poetry collection, Counting Descent, he uses childhood toys to represent and explain the indefinable feelings surrounding experiencing racism. An example of this is a “little girl jumping rope” in “No More Elegies Today” (line 3). Smith illustrates her playing with the rope by describing the “back & forth bob of her head” and the “beads in her hair [bouncing]” on her back (lines 9, 20). With these descriptions, Smith creates an innocent and playful feeling that juxtaposes the melancholy of the previous poems, such as the detail of the child whose “body [was] strewn across / the street” in “Playground Elegy” (lines 9-10). Through the shocking simpleness of the jump rope, Smith conveys how tired he is of hearing yet another story …show more content…

Another example of this approach is in “Playground Elegy,” where Smith uses a slide in a playground to show the emotions he had when he “[held] his hands towards the sky” (line 2). He then expands on this feeling further by explaining how ever since he slid down that slide with his hands in the sky, he felt that the “defiance of gravity / [was] synonymous with feeling alive” (lines 7-8). Therefore, raising his hands represents the empowering feeling of going against “gravity” (line 7). This is the same feeling he gets when he goes against his oppressors in his adult life; when he fights against racism, he feels alive. Thus, racism acts as the “gravity” in his adult life. At another point in his childhood, Smith had “bought Super Soakers” to play with his friends, who happened to be white (“Counterfactual” line 4). After ten minutes, his father urgently pulled him away from the fun by saying he was “foolish” and “naïve” to be “out [there] / acting the same” as his white friends, even though the kids were only “pretending to shoot guns” (“Counterfactual” lines 18, 21, 22-23, 24). While Smith was unaware of how this looked at the time, his father saw the danger behind a black boy holding a pretend gun, even though no one would think twice about his white friends doing the

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