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On My Father's Loss Of Hearing Poem Summary

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On My Father's Loss Of Hearing Poem Summary
Deaf People Are Still Disabled In the beginning of Joanna Diaz’s poem “On My Father’s Loss of Hearing,” she has an epigram. An epigram is a brief and memorable statement about the poem. Her epigram states that deaf people are not disabled, but only abled differently. In Joanne Diaz’ poem, “On My Father’s Loss of Hearing,” she contradicts her epigram and goes back and forth between depicting her father as abled and disabled. Joanne Diaz states all of the things her father has lost in the second stanza of her poem which contradicts her epigram. Diaz states that “[her father has] lost the humor of/ sarcastic jokes” (Diaz lines 8-9). Diaz states that her father can no longer hear the sarcasm in a joke. He cannot tell the tone in people voice …show more content…
Diaz states that he can “no longer obligated to transmit/ the crack of thawing ice that fills the yard’s / wide dip in winter, or the scrape of his/ dull rake in spring” (Diaz lines 15-18). Diaz proclaims that her father no longer has to hear the sound of ice in the winter or the scrape of his rake as he is working on the yard. Diaz states that this is good because he does not have to hear the sounds of everyday life. She proclaims that he is lucky for not having to hear these sounds. Diaz asserts that her father can “see his quiet/ flicker like a film, a Super-8/ projected on the wall/ and all of us/ there, laughing on the porch without a sound” (Diaz lines 22-25). Diaz declares that her father can only interpret what they are saying and not actually hear what they are saying. She sees this as an advantage because he is able to be by himself at all times. It is almost as if she would love to only be with her thoughts and not have to hear the sounds of everyday life. Diaz states that he gets his own silent film, however; Diaz does not think about how her father must be feeling. Her father has to sit there and watch his kids laugh and not be able to hear their laugh. Diaz also states that her father can no longer hear “noisome cruelty, baffled rage, / [or] aging children sullen in their lack” and states that “love hurts much less in this serenity” (Diaz lines 26-28). Diaz

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