Summary Of Clan Of Fatherless Children

The title of Clan of Fatherless Children by Chelsea Dingman, gives the reader a clue that the father of a family has died or is gone. The title also starts the poem’s mood as being sad and dark, because it tells of how a family is missing a father. Dingman also uses the word clan, which would not seem like a normal word to use for a group of children, which sparks the reader’s curiosity. Lastly, Throughout the poem, the narrator of the piece refers to her son as singular, which is ironic because Dingman makes Clan of Fatherless Children seem as more than one child. The narrator may have referred to her broken family as a Clan because she feels like she is fatherless because she misses her husband immensely.
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Starting at the end of line 3 though, the poet hits the reader by mentioning a truck that has driven off the road. Next, the narrator pulls at the reader’s emotion by explaining memories that the narrator and the person who has crashed the car has had, and then says that she “didn’t know [they] were close to death,” meaning she felt she had taken the memories for granted, and wished she could relive them. Next, on lines 7-12, the narrator explains her feelings about her husband’s death due to the accident. The woman says that she “ran from the world,” meaning that she did not want to accept reality, and uses the simile “like snow from the sky” to bring the reader’s attention toward that sentence. Dingman writes that “there is so much [the narrator] wants to say to [him], but [she chooses] to live.” The narrator wants to see her husband again, by joining him after death, but knows that if she dies she will be leaving her son behind. The writer then says that she wants the weatherman to mention a crash, because she does not want to be the one to tell her son that his father has died, and then says “The world outside, obliterated.” The narrator feels that her world is in pieces and everything is broken because of her great sorrow her husband’s death brought her, but she feels trapped in her home by writing that “The walls are winged beasts that fold themselves over [them].” Dingman concludes the poem with the final line: “[He] is the snow.” Dingman uses this to compare the narrator’s husband to the snow because eventually, like the snow melting as time goes on, she will have to move on from her husband’s