This is my blackout poem on the Veldt. I used Canva to create the poem and took the words from page 38 of The Hunger Games.

Alysa chose to write about the theme of alienation from the Veldt in her blackout poem ‘Bubbled’. This is evident in the lines ‘grimly, I forget people at all’ and ‘I’ll never know we’, which represents how we are becoming disconnected and isolated from everyone around us. She uses the social media symbols and bubbled people to show how technology is pulling people apart, leading them to become purposeless and alone as if they were floating in an empty space. She also explores the repercussions of our alienation, which is feelings of panic, sadness, and ‘starvation’ of interpersonal connections as shown in the line ‘too soon, I start to panic, starve, cry’. Alysa uses the repetition of ‘I’ in the line ‘clinging to I, I, I-‘ to emphasize how isolated we have become that there is no he, she, or they, only I, painting a picture of the narrator alone in a room with only themself for comfort. She uses the simile ‘the station is swarming with reporters like cameras clean of emotion’ to represent how some people have become like technology in their obsession with it, making them as robotic and mechanical as a camera. Alysa’s poem echoes some of the Veldt’s themes in that it shows a world isolated by technology, leaving some anxious and aimless like the Hadley parents and narrator or simply indifferent like the Hadley children and reporters. The line ‘to appear weak and frightened is from years back’ connects to the Veldt and our world by representing our desire to always have the best thing like the Happylife Home or go with the trends of social media, sometimes at the expense of our own health and values.