No Reservations

In the poem “No Reservations” the author wasn’t clear as to who the speaker could be. However, she used “I” once throughout the entire poem, and the reader could possibly assume that Nikki Giovanni is the speaker. The important motif in this poem would be the rules of war. She uses words like ‘revolution’, ‘battlefield’, ‘fire , ‘run’ and ‘shoot’ to feed off the main idea of the poem. Reservation is the act of reserving; keeping back or withholding. The tile of the poem is “No Reservation” and this could mean no holding back or reserving for war or rebellion. Nikki Giovanni begins the poem off with “ there are no reservations for the revolution” , which means there is no reserving for this rebellion .The structure of this poem is a little unusual , however I’ve read a poem by Nikki Giovanni with a similar structure. Previously, I assumed that if a poem is written only in lower case letters she’s writing the poem in a sense of urgency.  Capitalizing the letter “I” is obvious, but she keeps it lower case in this poem. The tone/attitude of this poem appears to give off a fed up or tired attitude. It seems as if the speaker is tired of watching individuals not being proactive within the revolution, because they aren’t given any motivation/signs to encourage them to fight back. Nikki Giovanni ends the poem off by saying “there will be reservations only if we fail”. This line explains how if the African American community fails at their rebellion they would be forced to holdback and wouldn’t have the ability to modify their rights within society.