"Horns on Your Head" by Hal Sirowitz from Word of Mouth (Reading Response)

Hal Sirowitz's poem about a mother warning her child to stay in his/her neighborhood makes me giggle and ponder on how much fun this kid's childhood is.  The mother seems like she probably entertains the whole family.  Her mention that "everyone on [the] block has either heard...or seen" her child paints an image of a very close-knit neighborhood, with the houses very close to one another.  I picture children playing hopscotch and jumping rope outside, near the stoops.  I can see the mailman and the ice-cream man knowing the children by name.  I picture a Brownstone.  This might be because I read from Sirowitz's short biography that he lives in Queens, New York, and also because the mother reminds me of the mother on Everybody Hates Chris.  Chris' mother would give him random words of wisdom that would really sound like threats.  The mother's threat in Sirowitz's poem comes when she reminds her listener that if the child strays as far as Nebraska, people "will want / to look for...horns" on the child's head because these people have "never met a Jew before."  This seems to imply that people's perception of Jewish folks is that they are evil, or devilish.  Perhaps this is why the mother wants to warn her child to stay where he/she is familiar; she is probably afraid her child will face discrimination.  Even if the mother knows people won't really think the Jewish child is a devil, she's trying to protect her child for as long as she can.  From this poem, I have learned that a good strategy to creating a visual is to implicitly describe one component of something that is familiar to people.  This way, readers will automatically get some kind of visual going in their minds.