Lorna Dee Cervantes: "Beneath the shadow of the freeway". An interpretation of the poem

Lorna Dee Cervantes: Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway The form of the poem is not easy to determine. It consists of six stanzas of uneven length, which are, except for the first and fifth, again divided into sub-stanzas. The meter is irregular as well as the length of the verses and there is also no rhyme scheme. Cervantes plays very freely with the structure of poems. She does not use an established type of …

…without feeling and thinking, a "blind worm". Just as nature and environment have to struggle with human progress, women have to struggle with men. A lot in this poems stays ambiguous and vague. Very often the voices of the three women are not to be identified; their identities merge and this increases the notion of continuity and connection among three generations of women, in which men will always be outsiders, even if they are "gentle".