Comments on The Air Raid

The Air Raid
http://poetsagainstthewar.org/displaypoem.asp?AuthorID=65127

I think that was I living in such a time, I would have been afraid of such a thing happening, and would have strongly resisted allowing anyone to be away from me. Like the Martin Luther King Day poem that I discussed earlier, the Bombing of Burmingham, the poet uses the characters she does to strongly convey that the innocent (children) get hurt because of conflicts that they have nothing to do with. It seems to me that the narrator is trying to distract herself with the candle, kind of a self-hypnosis sort of thing. I would imagine that Erna, is the younger sister of the narrator and that the playschool is the same as the kindergarten. I wonder if there is some sort of symbolism to the red candle. I suppose red is often used as blood (Poe, the Mask of the Red Death). Narrative poems, usually ones with significantly more detail than this, tend to affect me strongly. To most of the poems that I read, I was comparatively apathetic. ). I think that the reason for my lack of response was that many of the poems sounded like they were discussing events, by the dry technique that history books use. There wasn’t enough detail for me to feel like there were actual lives involved in the story. (In many of the stories there wasn't any background to the people involved, and I suppose there isn't much here, but it does mention that playschool is where the narrator's sister plays. (It sounds like it is her sister, anyway.)) This poem sounds more like a memory than other one’s do, and thereby lends credibility to the story. 
The sentences of the poem come in fragments. In the first poem there are three sentences of two parts, and in the second poem there are two sentences in three parts. In the third paragraph there is one sentence of three parts. This is the rhythm which creates a feeling of regularly decreasing speed. It would seem that this is used for dramatic effect.
The vocabulary creates the feeling that the narrator is a young child. He or she calls the mother "mama," and uses simple descriptors such as "big," "red," "yellow," and "ball."