"What the mirror said" by Lucille Clifton

Honestly, the first thing I thought of when I read this poem was, "that mirror is black."  I mean, the mirror doesn't conjugate the verbs correctly at all which gives it an inner city feeling.  After doing a quick google search, I learned that she was in fact black.  Getting back to the poem, the speaker is a mirror which I'm assuming is on a wall.  It is talking to a girl who is feeling self-conscience about her appearance.  The mirror then proceeds to give the girl a pep talk about how pretty she is and how any man would "have his hands on/ some/ damn/ body."  The mirror realizes how complicated the girl is and how she has "a geography" that somebody needs a map and directions to understand.  The syntax throughout the poem is not grammatically correct as I have already mentioned.  The structure is composed of short lines no longer than 3-4 words which adds emphasis to certain words.  It makes the reader pause while he or she reads making it sound, as I have already stated, like an inner city black person is talking.  More of a Will Smith in the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air than a Morgan Freeman or Samuel L. Jackson.

"you fit into me" by Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood is a Canadian writer who was born in 1939.  She is a witty author who takes sarcastic jabs at society.  She writes books, short stories, and poems.  She graduated from RadCliffe College (not affiliated with Daniel Radcliffe I'm sure).  In this poem, the first stanza seems optimistic and uplifting.  It seems to good to be true that "you fit into me" as if they were made to be together.  Atwood makes a comparison to a hook into an eye.  Something that is very hard to do.  Therefore,  nobody else can do what the other does.  Nobody else could fit into the "eye."    Then, there is a huge shift in tone in the second stanza.  The poem becomes very depressing and hate-filled.  The comparison gets skewed from a sweet sentiment to a harsh attack.  Instead of the second person completing the first, he or she is a major nuisance and hindrance. Now, the second person is crippling the other person.  The poem is short.  However, the poem is still impactful and leaves a message about how something that was enjoyable at first can turn out to be quite annoying.

"A Gray Haze Over the Rice Fields" by Jayanta Mahapatra

Mahapatra was born in India which is where this poem takes place.  The speaker remembers his childhood and how different things are now.  His grandma is no longer alive and he no longer gets to watch over the rice fields and the cattle.  Now all the speaker has to hold onto are the memories that are a "dangling thread" that "stops halfway down, where [his] hands cannot touch it."  The gray haze mentioned in the title is the lost memories.  They are no longer apart of the past or apart of the future.  That is why the speaker can no longer reach his memories.  They have been taken away by some sort of disaster in his country that has made it change so much that nothing is the same as it was.  All that is left is an unreachable haze that floats over the rice fields.  The worst part is that the speaker wants to reach them and go back to the way they were, but it is never going to happen.