Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Poverty (a view out of Ghana)

It’s ARTIFICIAL!
Debasing; sacrificial.
It sloshes about in your wine glass;
forms moulds in your whole-grain bread.
It eats a side slope in the soles
of your sterile, patent shoes.
It screams at the vanity
of the carats in your cufflinks,
and runs in savage mascara streaks
down your thankless, overfed face.
It teases, tortures, torments.
It’s a shameful man-eater!
It mocks expensive phone calls
in the show of love,
while standing in the blind glare
of dying requests for human kindness.
It’s cursing loudly in your waste bin;
putrefying, stockpiling to revolt.
Then, it will have your head,
with some of your own tea!
It’s ugly, horrible!
It’s something really shocking.
Don’t let it live near you!
Don’t let it live anywhere!

12 comments:

  1. nice one der. i hate poverty

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  2. So do I, Anon. This one was difficult to write.It could have been better in quality.

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  3. Wicked one Nana Yaw - nicely said. I am not sure what you meant about it being better in quality. The rawness and starkness of it sends the message home even more forcefully. I do like!

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  4. Awwww Denise, don't you flatter me! I am waiting to see what you churn out!

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  5. If I wrote soft this is...dynamite. Ridiculously well put, I think you have captured excellently a feel that I or any other well off person in a poverty strucken area sometimes has...the one which poisons not just your fancy phone, but your mind.

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  6. Ah, Kajsa, you saw through me. There was a little collective, societal guilt influencing my writing. Good.

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  7. This is beautiful. You so clearly display the heart wrenching desire with which we'd all like poverty to disappear.

    Wa aye adie!

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  8. this is so much like reality check for me and just feeds fat into my personal philosophy...

    point is we all work hard, don't we? so how come we have some feeding fat off the toils of others...

    let the resources in the world be evenly distributed...

    and Obama comes close...just a little close there...he says let's SPREAD it around...

    so that no full(or fool?)-of-oneself come pretending he's a millionaire because he and only he or she works more than every else...

    Nana...bravo
    these paths of poetry are not easy to thread...

    bravo!

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  9. Thanks, Novisi. When you say it all like that, I can only say I agree.

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