I don't understand poetry and I need some help

Oy, ok here's the story. I am finishing up my poetry unit in english and I am stumpped. Used to understand this stuff really well, but now I'm having nothing but problems. I found this one poem to do a personal response essay to, comparing a personal experience of mine to that of the speaker in the poem. All was good until I noticed that the speaker is an observer of the situation...now I'm stuck. I don't really know where I should start in writing a personal response to what the speaker is learning in this poem. If anyone can give me a hand that would be awesome!

Rush Hour Elaine Terranova

Odd, the baby's scabbed face peeking out over

the woman's shoulder. The little girl

at her side with her arm in a cast,

wearing a plain taffeta party dress.

The woman herself who is in shorts and sunglasses

among commuters in the underground station. Her body

that sags and tenses at the same time.


The little girl has not once moved
to touch her or to be touched.

Even on the train, she never turns and says,

"Mommy." Sunlight bobs over her blonde head

inclining toward the window. The baby

is excited now. "Loo, loo, loo, loo,"

he calls, a wet crescendo. "He's pulling

my hair," the little girl at last cries out.


A kind man comes up the aisle to see
the baby. He starts at those rosetters of blood

and wants to know what's wrong with him.

The woman says a dog bit him. "It must have been

a big dog then," "Oh, no. A neighbor's little dog."

The man says, "I hope they put that dog to sleep."

The woman is nearly pleading. "It was an accident. He didn't

mean to do it." The conductor, taking tickets,


asks the little girl how she broke her arm.
But the child looks out to the big, shaded houses.

The woman says, "She doesn't like to talk

about that." No one has seen what is behind

her own dark glasses. She pulls the children to her.

Maybe she is thinking of the arm raised over them,

its motion that would begin like a blessing.

 

Hi there

Why do you think the speaker is learning something?

 

Maybe "learning something" was the wrong words to use.
This is the exact assignment:
Compare the expierience of one speaker and the meaning of any one poem to one of your own expieriences and the meaning you derived from your experience.

I dont' really know how to do that...

 

I don't know if this helps, but it seems to me that the speaker is observing a woman in a relationship with a physically abusive man. I'm guessing he beats all three of them. He broke her daughter's arm, and he had something to do with the baby's "accident" (which was not caused by a dog). She wears dark glasses to hide her own injuries.

 

Yeah, that's what I gathered too.