Randall starts the poem ballad of birmingham with a soft sad tone . Randall wrote this poem based on a historical event of the bombing in 1963 of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s church Birmingham. This poem uses the ballad principle of the innocent questioner and the wiser respondent but it changes the entity of knowledge from fate to racial politics. The child is the conventional innocent, while the mother understands the violence of this political moment. …showed first 75 words of 321 total…

…showed last 75 words of 321 total…been destroyed as the ballad leaves the mother transfixed among the "bits of glass and brick," where she can find only her little girl's shoe but not the girl herself. This leads to a fact that the last word in life is not for human but for fate.That no matter the mother tried to prevant her child from harm in the end the little girl died where her mother thought it's a safe place.