48 Poverty poems

‘out of poverty to begin again’    impoverished of tone of pose that common wealth of parlance   Who so poor the words would   with   and take on substantial meaning   handholds   footholds to dig in one’s heels   sliding hands and heels beyond the residential lots   the plots   it is a poem which may be sung may well be sung

The poor have the best views, Views sloping down to sea. A green and yellow planet, A blue band, rung with stars. The poor have the best views. You have to walk to get there. Up three flights, narrow paths, Houses rising steeply side to side. No, no space for a car. When the flag lifts, you see the coast: Yellow curve of sand, Framed by reaching branches. Little humpbacked islands, Soon they will drill for oil there, Deep underwater. Once microscopic Diatoms swarmed in salt, danced, died. Fell to the bottom of fathoms, became black Slick hid in shale. They drill down miles... (Police arriving at the edge Of   the mind.) Are you thirsty? Something to drink? Please sit down. Yes, the game is on. We built that room by hand. I lie In bed at night dreaming of a new room, One jutting into sky. The eldest Daughter’s in university. Economics, But she switched to Environment. Out the door, the flag lifts, reveals. (Curve of   Rio.)Ordem e progresso. The poor have the best views, Samba in the sky.

1 So door to door among the shotgun shacks in Cullowhee and Waynesville in our cleanest shirts and ma’am and excuseme were all but second nature now and this one woman comes to the door she must have weighed three hundred pounds Would you be willing to tell us who you plan to vote for we say and she turns around with Everett who’re we voting for? The black guy says Everett. The black guy she says except that wasn’t the language they used they used the word we’ve all agreed to banish from even our innermost thoughts, which is when I knew he was going to win. 2 At which point the speaker discovers, as if the lesson were new, she has told the story at her own expense. Amazing, said my sister’s chairman’s second wife, to think what you’ve amounted to considering where you’re from, which she imagined was a compliment. One country, friends. Where when we have to go there, as, depend upon it, fat or thin, regenerate or blinkered-to-the-end, we shall, they have to take us in. I saw 3 a riverful of geese as I drove home across our one-lane bridge. Four hundred of them easily, close-massed against the current and the bitter wind (some settled on the ice) and just the few at a time who’d loosen rank to gather again downstream. As if to paraphrase. The fabric every minute bound by just that pulling-out that holds the raveling together. You were driving all this time? said Steven. Counting geese? (The snow falling into the river.) No. (The river about to give itself over to ice.) I’d stopped. Their wingspans, had they not been taking shelter here, as wide as we are tall.

In the muddy maze of some old neighborhood, Often, where the street lamp gleams like blood, As the wind whips the flame, rattles the glass, Where human beings ferment in a stormy mass, One sees a ragpicker knocking against the walls, Paying no heed to the spies of the cops, his thralls, But stumbling like a poet lost in dreams; He pours his heart out in stupendous schemes. He takes great oaths and dictates sublime laws, Casts down the wicked, aids the victims' cause; Beneath the sky, like a vast canopy, He is drunken of his splendid qualities. Yes, these people, plagued by household cares, Bruised by hard work, tormented by their years, Each bent double by the junk he carries, The jumbled vomit of enormous Paris,— They come back, perfumed with the smell of stale Wine-barrels, followed by old comrades, pale From war, mustaches like limp flags, to march With banners, flowers, through the triumphal arch Erected for them, by some magic touch! And in the dazzling, deafening debauch Of bugles, sunlight, of huzzas and drum, Bring glory to the love-drunk folks at home! Even so, wine pours its gold to frivolous Humanity, a shining Pactolus; Then through man's throat of high exploits it sings And by its gifts reigns like authentic kings. To lull these wretches' sloth and drown the hate Of all who mutely die, compassionate, God has created sleep's oblivion; Man added Wine, divine child of the Sun.

Portions of a mango tree the storm cut down, a green blaze bent into mud and they come to me, at dawn three girls from Kanpur, far to the north admittedly (we know this from national geography class, the borders of states, the major cities). They hung themselves from fans. In the hot air they hung themselves so that their father would not be forced to tender gold he did not have, would not be forced to work his fists to bone. So that is how a portion of the story goes. Slowly in the hot air they swung, three girls. How old were they? Of marriageable age certainly. Sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen, something of that sort. How do I feel about it? What a question! I am one of three sisters, most certainly I do not want father to proffer money he does not have for my marriage. Get a scooter, a refrigerator, a horde of utensils, silks, and tiny glittering bits of gold to hang about my ears and throat. Gold is labor time accumulated . . . labor time defined. Who said that? Yes, I am a schoolteacher, fifth standard trained in Indian history and geography, Kerala University, first class first. The storm tree puts out its limbs and I see three girls swinging. One of them is me. Step back I tell myself. Saumiya, step back. The whole history of womankind is compacted here. Open your umbrella, tuck your sari tight, breathe into the strokes of catastrophe, and let the school bus wait. You will get to it soon enough and the small, hot faces. See how the monsoon winds soar and shunt tropic air into a house of souls, a doorway stopped by clouds. Set your feet into broken stones and this red earth and pouring rain. For us there is no exile.

Little Chihuahita shadowed beside Segundo barrio. A dead German sheperd with a broken neck lies on the side of the street for days. The stench of El Paso’s sewage in the air, a Mexican flag hugely flaps itself above the chain-linked fence topped with razor wire. In the morning blue mountains smog. South side of the border a man jogs. The river’s bank green, small trees bob in the wind like truffle-treats, mirage. Each day thousands cross the open bridge, both ways, each night they go home to sleep silence. Cars hum and wait for hours like sleeping cats. A cemented river half-dried, even the canal drains away. Some say droves of shadows at night move ghost-like through the dying river. These people grow invisible, as if air, irrelevant and holy; at night I can hear the whisper of my grandfather, “all the angels live in Juárez.” There is an old language broken in my throat. Some eyes mistake me for shadow. When I speak my voice a fearful phantom. In spring dust storms come, the sky browns, my visage half-forms beneath the Italian cypress; and when the day’s moon is full in its silence, I am afraid of my own darkness.

The poor are many and so— impossible to forget. No doubt, as day breaks, they see the buildings where they wish they could live with their children. They can steady the coffin of a constellation on their shoulders. They can wreck the air like furious birds, blocking out the sun. But not knowing these gifts, they enter and exit through mirrors of blood, walking and dying slowly. And so, one cannot forget them.

I saw an old cottage of clay, And only of mud was the floor; It was all falling into decay, And the snow drifted in at the door. Yet there a poor family dwelt, In a hovel so dismal and rude; And though gnawing hunger they felt, They had not a morsel of food. The children were crying for bread, And to their poor mother they’d run; ‘Oh, give us some breakfast,’ they said, Alas! their poor mother had none. She viewed them with looks of despair, She said (and I’m sure it was true), ‘’Tis not for myself that I care, But, my poor little children, for you.’ O then, let the wealthy and gay But see such a hovel as this, That in a poor cottage of clay They may know what true misery is. And what I may have to bestow I never will squander away, While many poor people I know Around me are wretched as they.

Barely twenty-five, he smells of yesterday’s spit and vomit, black beard droops in clumps from his drawn, sun-savaged face. Hanging from a string around his neck: a small holy book. This man was once a child held against the breast of a mother who kissed his small meaty hands that smelled of milk and tears.

Far far from gusty waves these children's faces. Like rootless weeds, the hair torn round their pallor: The tall girl with her weighed-down head. The paper- seeming boy, with rat's eyes. The stunted, unlucky heir Of twisted bones, reciting a father's gnarled disease, His lesson, from his desk. At back of the dim class One unnoted, sweet and young. His eyes live in a dream Of squirrel's game, in tree room, other than this. On sour cream walls, donations. Shakespeare's head, Cloudless at dawn, civilized dome riding all cities. Belled, flowery, Tyrolese valley. Open-handed map Awarding the world its world. And yet, for these Children, these windows, not this map, their world, Where all their future's painted with a fog, A narrow street sealed in with a lead sky Far far from rivers, capes, and stars of words. Surely, Shakespeare is wicked, the map a bad example. With ships and sun and love tempting them to steal — For lives that slyly turn in their cramped holes From fog to endless night? On their slag heap, these children Wear skins peeped through by bones and spectacles of steel With mended glass, like bottle bits on stones. All of their time and space are foggy slum. So blot their maps with slums as big as doom. Unless, governor, inspector, visitor, This map becomes their window and these windows That shut upon their lives like catacombs, Break O break open till they break the town And show the children to green fields, and make their world Run azure on gold sands, and let their tongues Run naked into books the white and green leaves open History theirs whose language is the sun.