Heads sweat from the heat boiling above
Bodies ache from the hard everyday labor
Feet run quickly to get from place to place
Cars come with extra zeros
Children wail and hunger for more
Mothers give up the last spoonful of rice to end the pain of the youngins
Father wake at dawn only to have but a few pennies to spare
Education is no longer a priority by age 16
The superiors turn their heads as if their necks have been snapped off
Weddings and funerals are grievances altogether, for thoughts of bill care givers linger in the air
Not one but a toilet in the ground
Fear of outside creatures no longer exists
Life compared to one on a farm; animals raised then slain to fill the suffering pain of life
Poverty is the name of me.
Poverty is my hereditary. Yellow grass lit with the smell of cigarettes and blunts. Tears dried with the sleeveless pillow cold hard. This is no hood, this is Nigeria. There is no difference between the thief and president, for they are one. A place where your future is ruled by how good you are at cheating, thieving, and killing. No future for me. No rest from ruining from the threat of downfall at every corner. So I run never looking back. But eventually I'll stop turn and salvage what is left. In the ruins of the evil money has caused. Poverty is the name of me.
She wakes up to herd the sheep because they are what bring her the money.
Her back aches from a genetic spell of arthritis.
There is no medicine, except for a faith in her God.
She prays that one day someone will save her from this land of the poor.
On one side of the mountain, the tourists see this ensemble of land and American beauty.
But just past the red walled aperture, lies a dusty child hungered and yearning for a chance at learning.
How do they survive? Or is it really us? See that’s my family out there, I share the blood of those people covered in dust.
But the funny thing is, is that I have enough. It’s not a funny in the terms of laughing, but it’s a funny like “wow”. How could I be so blessed, when my family suffers from the absence of the simple things we take for granted like visiting the doctor and having money for a couple of cans of Spam, nothing less.
In the advantages we have like classrooms, we learn about it in books, we stare at pictures of people slumped over with not a smile in sight. “This is how they live” the book might say, but do they ever give?
We derive from cultures, where people are poor.
They slumber in cots, with a thin sheet, as the devils of the cold air creep under the door.
Poverty is un-humbled and it’s unfair.
I may need a grander word, but it’s SAD, that we don’t always care!
Poverty is you, it’s me.
Not only because of the lacking of money.
But because there is an absence in our hearts of the wanting to heal the world we share.
Poverty is we.