Facing Poverty
If I went barefoot for a lifetime,
shoes would be pointless.
Toes ate board, concrete, grassland, shoreline.
Me, Tarzan to pedicurist!
~
was poor but didn’t own it.
~
Text-book believers
trembled at anomalies
as cats dreading water.
Drooling high-schoolers
rated us backward and poor
in sound-bite studies
of Third-World History:
Pre-teens
Pseudo–adults
who
would eat themselves out of existence;
into untimely graves.
A tragic (re)plot:
manic appetites
(fast-food) Colonizers
Chronic disease
Casualties.
~
the
needs of yesterday’s youth were righteously sated.
Necessities supplied. Dissatisfaction abated.
Here,
faces of stately impoverishment,
regnant paupacy,
dignified indigence
felt fat from
sheer contentment.
Seated to table buckling beneath loaded plates,
squeezed between Gran´s dependable knees,
she ladled solid food
that grew grand giants,
sans measurement.
Dashing, splashing flavors
imparting finely seasoned nourishment.
Almost believing Gran´s long spoon was a wishing stick
prestidigitating post-meal spectacles -
global bellies
gassed by
food
free
of conspiracy
and chemical.
Fields nourished providentially:
rain showers and solar rays
and dungs.
Sowers reaped
yams,
breadfruit.
Oil-down tonight!
You couldn’t lick the moonlight off your lips,
and not a trace of food waste
save for what would later be displaced
in the latrine.
Meal dumplings were well enough,
thriving inside unshallow yellow split pea soups.
Ham and fowl could share with your neighbor's enemies.
There was plenty.
~
We, Carib-beans,
were fed, bare feet, content,
spared the rod of keenest hungers.
Have you then seen the face of poverty?
~
Was it
bent and bony,
damp and drooping,
flagging,
wearied,
wired ...
vexed
or sour,
dewy-eyed;
a legless Mexican in San Luis
banging an offering-pan,
sourcing alms towards his penury;
akin to the vulture´s sanguine smile,
when praying beside a starving child?
~
If your silver spoon
was a pot-spoon,
say you were
a rich fool -
Gran’s gracious hand,
stirring cooking-fires,
raised gilded clans
without gold.
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