3 posts tagged “poverty poetry”
Black Belt Blues
One day Rosa Parks was just too tired
of accepting that's how things are.
Martin Luther King had a prophetic vision
he wouldn't live to see the mountaintop.
Sweltering heat, poverty, racism and despair
still claim all the breathing space
between the catfish ponds and the cottonfields.
The blind, the crippled, the poor, and the elderly
bundle up in layers hugging their own warmth
to sleep at night, staring at falling stars
through their cracked and rusty sky.
Children nibble a mouldy potato.
Abandoned cars, corpulent vultures
loveless dogs walking nowhere
claim these back rural dusty roads.
Raw sewage pours into the open grass.
The sun bakes it all hard and crusty.
You can clean motel rooms for a dollar each.
Walk four miles to wash a white woman's clothes.
Beg a ride to the grocery store.
Mothers sing their Baptist prayers.
For your children's sake you stay alive.
The young people have escaped
rewarded with real jobs, real pay, real benefits
In the cities and way up north.
Their mothers used a switch with loving hands
to help them find their blackbird wings.
But once they've tasted
respect, human dignity, a life worth living,
they can't go home again.
They can't sleep there.
There's no peace in their souls,
only fear, anger, defiance
and the god damned bloody tears.
Cheryl Lynn Moyer
(Published in Down In the Dirt Magazine - 2006)
It could have been a lesson right out of a class on satire.
Gross exaggerations of characteristics in order to illustrate a point.
A new lens with which to view societal problems.
The only problem was that over Spring Break
the story was real.
Once upon a time there was a city called New Orleans…
a true story of unfortunate events.
Our paths crossed, and now neither of us will be the same.
Satire. Life. Lessons.
This time the situation was real.
The characters were real.
Mrs. Wade. Mr. Jones, Vera, Donald.
If the story had been written by Pope,
it would have masterfully satirized the country’s
racial tensions and denial of poverty by using a fairy tale
set in the little town of New Orleans.
If only the story had been written by Pope.
Katrina wove a different tale.
New Orleans nearly died a year and a half ago
after suffering from an abusive hurricane and then
nearly overdosing on water.
The rehabilitation process has been a slow one.
White people have the money to rehab.
To rebuild their broken homes,
and pick up the pieces of their broken lives.
That’s nice for them.
No really, it’s nice. Someone has to start rebuilding
and it sure as hell isn’t going to be people from the lower classes.
They don’t even have enough money to get back to the city
let alone gut their house and start over.
Think that New Orleans is just a bunch of bayou
stuck beneath sea level next to a river.
Think again.
New Orleans is filled with mountains.
Mountains that people face when trying to rebuild their lives.
Government, society, poverty, race.
Just like Everest.
And these people won’t ever rest.
Not until their lives are restored.
They say that Katrina added 10 years to everyone’s life.
Some people don’t have 10 years.
Didn’t have 10 years.
The hurricane didn’t kill them when it hit,
but the hurricane killed them.
How does it feel to rely on the generosity of volunteers to rebuild a city?
To humble oneself to ask for help in one moment, many moments of need.
I wouldn’t be able to do it.
Many people can’t.
It’s far easier just close that chapter of life and start a fresh page elsewhere.
Life. Lessons. Stories.
For me it was like Vesuvius had erupted again.
Causing devastation, and preserving it beneath
layers of ash. Only there was no ash.
The city was preserved beneath a layer of poverty.
The archeologists: the volunteers piling out
of the long white vans only to discover that
A house that looks normal from the outside is dying on the inside.
The inside of these houses are perfectly preserved.
and why?
Because there is no money.
Because rebuilding is slow.
A watered down version of a once vibrant culture.
An election is coming up.
In just a short period of time television will be filled with political ads.
Millions upon millions of dollars spent, and for what?
To ruin the reputation, the life of another human being.
Katrina ruined lives for free.
Wouldn’t it be great if those millions of dollars
were spent in a more constructive way.
Not constructing a reputation, or a political machine.
But to rebuild a home. Mr. Jones’ home. Mrs. Wade’s home.
Landscape for the Disappeared
Lo & behold. Yes, peat bogs
in Louisiana. The dead
stumble home like swamp fog,
our lost uncles & granddaddies
come back to us almost healed.
Knob-fingered & splayfooted,
all the has been men
& women rise through nighttime
into our slow useless days.
Live oak & cypress
counting these shapes in a dance
human forms aren't made for. Faces
waterlogged into their own
pure expression, unanswerable
questions on their lips.
Dumbstruck premonitions rise
from the heckle-grass
to search us out.
Guilty, sings the screech owl.
I hear the hair keeps growing
in the grave. Here
moss lets down a damp light.
We call back the ones
we've never known, with stories
more ours than theirs.
The wind's low cry
their language, a lunar rainbow
lost among Venus's-flytraps
yellowing in frog spittle & downward mire,
boatloads of contraband
guns & slot machines dumped
through the years.
Here's this lovely face so black
with marsh salt. Her smile,
a place where minnows swim.
All the full presence
shiny as a skull under the skin.
Say it again - we are
spared nothing.
"Landscape for the Disappeared" by Yusef Komunyakaa from Neon Vernacular (Wesleyan University Press, 1995).
(c) 1995 by Yusef Komunyakkaa and reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
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