Gary Soto The Red Palm Summary

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Gary Soto’s poem, The Red Palm, opens by evoking the dream like quality of the monotony of working in a cotton field, where chopping and swinging a hoe in the hot sun becomes as much a part of you as breathing, “You raise a hoe, swing, and the first weeds / Fall with a sigh. You take another step, / Chop, and the sigh comes again, / Until you yourself are breathing that way.” Red Palm is about a farm laborer whose ability to feed his family is measured in the rows of cotton he chops and weeds he hoes from dawn to dusk. He works for the whole day in the cotton field, the sun shining very brightly, hot and burning like the red blisters emerging on his palms. There are quite a number of figures of speech in this poem, like this metaphor, “The

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