It's still the wild west

My first internal structure poem is Heaven by Cathy Song, which you can find on page 1011 of the Norton.

The poem, told from the perspective of a Chinese-American (I assume) woman living in the mid-West with her family. Each stanza signals a reflection on a different person, starting with the speaker's "son the dreamer," then herself, then her grandfather, and once again herself, speaking of her son.

The speaker's biracial son, whose "blond hair" separates him from other Chinese and Chinese-American people, thinks of China with longing. He even has the notion that China will be his heaven when he dies, showing how much he feels a connection with that part of his heritage. He doesn't think negatively of where he lives, but simply desires to see the land, the "blue flower," of his ancestors.

In contrast to the "blue flower," the speaker, his mother, focuses on the "black dot" where they live. She speaks of "the pancake plains" with disdain and wonders "why here?" The romanticized "wild west" that her predecessors flocked to and helped create by building the Union Pacific railroad is still wild, she says, but in a bad way. It's run down, overgrown, and lawless. She cannot imagine how it came to be like this and why she has stayed there.

The third stanza displays the perspective of the speaker's grandfather, who came to America to work building the railroads. She shows how, disillusioned, he came to the "Golden Mountain," which conjures up images of opulence and success, which ultimately becomes a barren land of "ghost towns." He is also disillusioned because he planned on returning to China, but America, which at one point symbolized wealth and happiness, became his downfall and eventual death.

The final stanza returns the reader to the speaker and her son. She speaks of his desire to return as having "skipped two generations." The description of her surroundings change, however, and it appears that her son's hope and optimism enable her to see the "shimmering blue" of the mountains.