Workday and Did I Miss Anything?

The theme for Workday by Linda Hogan is that we ignore parts of our lives and the world around us that we do not want to face. People often think if they do not have to confront the evils in the world those evils do not really exists. The poem is a allegory form of narrative. She is telling the story of her workday and the things she does not want to know, and the things she is "seeing" for the first time. "I go to work...,I go to the university...,I ride the bus home...,When I get off the bus...," She uses visual imagery talking about the things  she sees. Linda says: "I look back at the light in the windows, and how the women are all alone, in each seat.
It's like the first time she made a connection with the other women on the bus." She also says, "then I see them walking on the Avenue, the beautiful feet, the perfect legs, even their spider veins,..., the shoulders which bend forward and forward and forward to protect the heart from pain." She is noticing others who are returning home from work. How beautiful these people are even with their crippled bodies and how they too try to ignore the things that cause them pain in their lives. She uses a free form structure in her poem. The stanza's have different amounts of lines. The lines do not rhyme, they are more like written down thoughts as she thinks about them. When she is talking to the bus driver she says: "We talk about the weather and not enough exercise. I didn't mention Victor Jara's mutilated hands or men next door in exile or my own family's grief over the lost child." It's kind of like how people know things happen but if we do not discuss it we do not have to face it.
The poem Did I Miss anything? by Tom Wayman, is saying that when we miss important things in our lives we cannot ever get that exact opportunity back. That moment is gone forever. This poem is diction, the choice of the words "everything" and "nothing" are used throughout the poem to let the reader know what you could have had and what you ended up with because you were not there.The figurative language he uses in part of the poem is hyperbole. He exaggerated things that happened because the student was not present in class. "A shaft of light descended and an angel or other heavenly being appeared and revealed to us what every women or man must do to attain divine wisdom in this life and the thereafter." The structure of this poem is also a free form. Wayman set the stanzas about everything to the right and the stanzas about nothing to the left. He separated them like on the right hand you could have had everything, but you chose the left hand and have nothing.