The first thing the reader gets is a sound. "shake shake" is less a description than a re-enactment: the word repeats the way a tremor does, and "did you hear that" pulls us in as if we were standing beside the speaker in the dark. The poem is about surviving an earthquake and what comes after it, which is the loss of everything that made a life feel secure. Its central idea is that a disaster is not only physical. The ground stops moving, but the grief and bewilderment keep going, and they end up aimed at the speaker's own self.
The poem moves in a steady narrowing. It begins wide, with "thousand cry out making a river" and "many house gone". The image of a river is striking because it turns a crowd's weeping into a landscape, as though the people have replaced the ground that has failed them. Then the lens tightens to "my family friend boyfriend girlfriend mother father sister brother aunt". Nothing separates these words, no commas and no ranking. A parent, a boyfriend and an aunt all stand side by side, which gives the line the breathlessness of someone naming everyone they love before they can stop. The next lines shrink the focus again, to the body: "no food to eat", "my eye are sollowing from crying", "im hungry". By the end the earthquake has moved inward to a feeling: "i hate my self but i dont know why this feeling is here."
That last line may be the most honest in the poem. The speaker cannot explain the self-hatred and does not pretend to. Judging by the text, it could be a kind of guilt, or it could be the mind searching for something to blame when the real cause is too large to blame. The poem doesn't decide, and it is stronger for leaving the question open. Even the spelling "my self", split into two words, seems to show a person divided from themselves.
There is no rhyme and no steady rhythm here, and the form acts out the chaos. Lines run from two words to nearly twenty. The long catalogue of relatives is followed at once by the flat "no food to eat", and the poem ends its sequence of needs with the smallest, plainest statement of all: "im hungry". After all that grief, a basic bodily want has the last practical word.
The questions deserve attention too. "where do i go" and "what do i do" arrive without question marks, and nobody answers them. They read less like requests for information than like thoughts circling in the head. The same goes for the repeated "no": "no where to go", "no food", "no home no family". Writing "no where" as two words gives the idea a literal edge, since it sounds like a place that has been crossed off the map. Small phrases like "just because this earthquake" carry bewilderment, as if the speaker cannot believe that something so brief could take so much.
The spelling and grammar are far from polished: "are died", "dont", "feeel", "sollowing" (most likely meant as "swollen"). It would be easy to call these mistakes, but they work in the poem's favour. The extra "e" in "feeel" stretches the word out as if the feeling will not finish, and the lowercase "i" repeated throughout makes the speaker look small against what has happened. Nothing is dressed up. Because there is no decoration, the voice sounds like someone speaking straight to us rather than someone writing a poem.
That directness is what makes the piece significant. The poem names no place and no date, and nothing outside the text is needed to understand it. That absence lets it stand for anyone who has lost a home and a family at once. It offers no comfort, no moral and no recovery. It stops where the speaker is stuck, with hunger, tears and a feeling with no name. In doing so it reminds us that behind the numbers in any news report about a disaster there are individual voices, and one of them is saying: "what do i do".