Boundaries Blog

Robert Frost’s "Mending Wall," Yusef Komunyakaa’s "Slam, Dunk and Hook,’ and Judith Ortiz Cofer’s "The Game" all have a common theme of barriers and walls to the outside world. Some of these barriers were forced while others were intentional. Either way these walls and barriers have consequences.
In Cofer’s "The Game" Cruz is a humpbacked girl which makes physical and emotional barriers that prevent her from interacting socially and physically with other children. Cruz was able to overcome her boundaries by playing imagination games where it didn’t matter if she had a deformity or not. The barriers Cruz dealt with greatly affected the narrator of the poem. The author wrote "her head sat incongruously upon a body made of stuck-together parts..." The girl obviously had problem if the author uses such a detailed metaphor. The narrator also sympathized for the girl and the struggles she had to deal with. "I’d praise her lavishly for the imaginary dishes she placed before me, while she laughed." In this case the character was born with these barriers and used imagination and fantasy to get past them at least for a little while. It seems like the narrator really respected Cruz for the way she handled her situation.
In Frost’s "Mending Wall" the barrier is an actual wall. Every spring the two next door neighbors come together to repair the fence that runs along their properties. They continue to keep repairing the fence. The one neighbor questions why they continue to do this annually while the other doesn’t. The unquestioning neighbor continues building the fence simply its because his father did before him and probably his father before that. He simply does it because it is what has always been done. This poem really made me think of barriers that we have today that were passed to us by our parents. We all receive barriers that our parents gave to us. And it this poem gets the readers to wonder if the barriers we have today are still necessary.
The third and final poem, Komunyakaa’s "Slam Dunk & Hook" is about the physical boundaries our bodies have. In the poem, the basketball team surprises themselves by playing so well and consistent. "We had moves we didn’t know we had." This shows they broke the boundaries their bodies and minds had built for them because they had more motivation from the death of the one boy’s mother.
These three pieces all express how people have barriers, both physically and emotionally. Some of boundaries are forced like in "The Game" where the girl was born with a physically deformity. Other boundaries exist because of traditions and no one really knows if they are necessary. Everyone has some kind of barrier, but it is how they deal with them and break them that is unique.