Poetry Analysis: "Thinking About Bill, Dead of AIDS"

“Thinking about Bill, Dead of AIDS,” by Miller Williams is a poem of a  narrator speaking about his friends dying of AIDS. Instead of speaking of just his emotions towards his friend dying, the narrator uses words such as “we” and “us,” speaking of many people feeling sorrow. The poem begins with the narrator talking about how he never knew that AIDS was so powerful in such lines as, “We did not know how the first thing about, how blood surrenders to even the smallest threat.” I enjoyed how the author compares the attack of AIDS to an actual battle between warriors. The uses this form of personification is the lines, “the body rescinding all its normal orders to all defenders of flesh, betraying the head, pulling its guards back from all its borders.”