Fundamentalism

"Fundamentalism" by Nye was the first poem i chose to read and the reason I picked it was because it instantly caught my eye while I had been flipping through the pages of 19 Varieties of Gazelle. The reason it caught my eye was because of the way she created the last two verses or stanzas, they were indented much more than any of the earlier stanzas.

That was not the only reason "Fundamentalism" caught my attention, as I was reading it, I noticed that all, except the last two stanzas again, were all ending in the form of a question even if it was not really a question she was writing.

There were a few lines that intrigued me, "If one way could satisfy the infinite hearts of the heaven?" and then the final line, which was, "If he would believe his life is like that he would not follow his father into war." The first of the two lines I believe that I interpreted differently than most other people because I saw it as a call for unity; I saw the heavens as not necessarily souls of people but more so that of God. I interpreted this as a call for peace. Seeing as she is both Palestinian and American and that there have been wars waged over the Holy Lands long before she was born, I take her words to be full of hope for the future that one day all religions can coexist without bloodshed.

The very last line of this piece is very important because it is showing that not all people want to stay in the same rut their entire lives and that if the son, here, does not wish to live the life his father lived, he must deviate and create his own path or destiny.