uation is clear, and most of the poem is taken up with the musings of the mother as she reacts to the questions asked by her son. The question forces her to reconsider the history of the south and her own place in that history. It forces her to reconsider her relationship with her son and to wonder in effect how any mother could tolerate the sorts of things that happened in the South in the past given that such events harmed the children of some mother somewhere. The mother creates the image of a group of white men hanging a young man and then going back to play cards even though there was now blood on their hands:
When my children bleed, my own blood rushes
as if out of me. What if he were one of mine?
The poet effectively generalizes from this one mother to the plight of all mothers and to the way parents and children never manage to communicate on past history until the younger generation has become openly appalled at the reality of the older generation.
Minnie Bruce Pratt's poem "Poem for My Sons" is a lyric about change, tracing that change through the life of her sons. When they were born, there were no poets who were women, and now that they are grown, she is not the woman she once was and doe snot have to be because the times have changed. The poem celebrates these changes and also serves as a warning to the sons not to slide back to an earlier time but to revel in the freedom that has been given to women.
The speaker is clearly the poet--the title alone tells us that this is so, and the voice throughout is consistent in being someone used to expressing herself in words and now doing so. She is also a mother, a stance often taken by Pratt in her poetry, and she speaks to her sons in order to make them aware of the changes that have taken place since their birth. She makes direct reference to Yeats and his poetry to his daughter and son, and such poetry has allowed young men ever since to hear the voice o...