Task 1

America did not foresee
Green, pink, purple and other colors death potpourri!
Expecting others to pay a high price.
Now thinking twice?
Toll on the innocent and unborn.

Omnipotent and disregarding who will mourn.
Reflective about all the illness, birth defects and prematurely dead.
All the deceit continues to spread.
Nefariously America led astray -
Generations untold WILL pay -
Execrable effects of agent orange spray!
Hubert Wilson

The poem I would like to analyze is Rainbow Death by Hubert Wilson. To understand more about the poem, I did some research on what agent orange is and who Hubert Wilson is. Hubert Wilson is a Vietnam war veteran who served in the USAF Security Service. He was prepped for about 14 months at Kelly AFB in San Antonio, Texas, before he was sent to Vietnam. Half of the troops ended up in Da Nang, an agent orange hotspot, while he and the rest were assigned to Shemya Island, Alska, which was what eventually was a more contaminated environment than Da Nang. He had spent his years as an intelligence analyst there, and 15 years ago, he started suffering from unexplainable health problems. Now, since he has mobility issues, he has become a writer.

Now, let's move on to what Agent Orange is. Agent orange, in short, is used in chemical warfare during the Vietnam war. Although it was discovered in the 1920s, serious testing only began in the 1960s. Agent Orage was used to deny an enemy cover and to conceal dense terrain by defoliating trees and shrubbery where the enemy could hide.

Finally, I will talk about the poem.

The purpose of this poem, is to show the brutality of war. Hubert Wilson shows this by saying things like "Toll on the innocent and unborn". This statement shows that many innocent civilians would die even though war is something between soldiers. Hubert Wilson goes on to talk about how Agent Orange and other gases would affect the unborn. This means that people of the later generation would be born with birth defects and so on.

After doing some research, I realised that Rainbow could mean "Peace". If Rainbow means peace, then warfare would be the "rain". A rainbow only forms after the rain, and the title is saying that only after warfare would there be peace. However, the contents of the poem begs to differ. Thus, my guess is that the title is not meant to show that with war comes peace, but is trying to convey that as modern technology and better weapons are made, the use of toxic gas would be used in warfare. It is either that, or that Hubert Wilson is trying to make a pun out of these words.

So...what do you think? Would there be peace only after war?