Won't Be But A Minute- Patricia Smith

This poem is about leaving Luther B, a dog, behind as a family evacuates New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina. There were a few lines in this poem that stuck out to me. "That dog done been rained on before..." I feel that this line is an example of how people underestimated Hurricane Katrina. The following lines says that they will leave some food and water out for him, and he will be fine. This line I feel underestimated the storm as well, "We gon' be back home soon this thing pass over." Most likely they would not have had a home to return to. Throughout this entire poem I feel like Smith is foreshadowing the damage that people aren't expecting. "You heard the man--he said Go--and you know white folks don't warn us 'bout nothing unless they scared too." This is a racist comment that I feel like we deserved. We (white people) told the people to leave everything behind, everything that they had worked for, but without helping them. Hurricane Katrina primarily effected the poor side of New Orleans, which made it difficult for people to leave. A lot of people had nowhere to go, or couldn't afford to leave. The ones who left had the attitude of, "We gon' just wait this storm out. Then we come back home. Get our dog." Although this poem is based around a dog, I feel like Luther B can be a metaphor for everything. People left all of their possessions behind assuming they could come back to get them and they would be fine. Smith may have chosen a dog to be the image in the essay because many people can connect to the emotional attachment people have with pets. In a like manner many people have emotional attach.ments to their possessions, all of which were lost in the storm

(Does any particular image run throughout the essay? If so, why does the author chose it? Does it have any “metaphorical significance”? Does it transform in any way from the beginning to the end of the essay?)