I was re-reading my last post and I just realized that I got side-tracked and forgot to relate the free verse form to the content in "Brazil, January 1, 1502."

As I'm looking over the poem again I'm finding half-rhymes but there doesn't seem to be any regular pattern to them. The half-rhymes also seem to break down a bit more in the last two stanzas, becoming more sparse. The last stanza has none while the second to last makes use of only the "l" sound in its end words. These slant rhymes may say something about how broken and ravaged Brazil was after being invaded by Portuguese explorers. It's as if, just like the rhymes, the people were barely hanging on. The randomness of the rhymes represents the chaos that ensued after the Portugeuse enslaved the South Americans, effectively destroying the civilizations they had built over thousands of years.