Parsley Themes

This poem is utterly infested with violence. Since the premise is the death of 20,000 people by the order of one man, the piece takes on cruelty of epic proportions. Even the literal act of harvest...

In the midst of all this killing, there's a very interesting economic subtext that has a lot to do with where the poem actually takes place. On a geographic level, we're in the Caribbean – Ha...

Power is very much related to the wealth issue. (Ever heard the phrase "money is power" or "money talks"? That's where we're coming from here.) The power dynamic in this poem is very clearly deline...

So, wealth, power, and this theme, hate, are all very much connected in this poem. (We're having kind of a hard time telling them apart, really. Bear with us.) They're tough to separate from each o...

This might seem like a kind of "secondary" theme, considering that it only pops up in the second part of the poem, and it's almost entirely fictional (we know next to nothing about Trujillo's mothe...