Tag: Hunger

Hosanna!

Grief stricken, an empty armed mother

wanders outside the city gates and

meets the family leaving their home,

empty pocketed, no wage to come.

Misshapen people, ostracised sit

in the shade of the tombs and rocks,

longing for a health to enter

the city where they are unclean,

where deprivation, disease, death

and hatred walk hand in hand.

———–

No one cares, she cries, sobbing.

Our children, homeless starving.

No one to help us survive, shouts

the father and the lepers echo

their hurts in voices worn thin

from ill use and groaning;

—–

huddled against the threats,

isolated and desperate 

they hear the growing crowds.

Listening they hear ‘Hosanna’

move closer, curious and

craving hope.

——

A donkey, palm strewed, weaving

down into a walled off city, where 

only the rich are blessed and glad

only the powerful comfortably clad

in purple and gold, glittering,

dripping

with self-importance and sin.

———

Feeling leprous left out of celebration,

grieving see the crowd’s jubilation.

and a tired man, over big for a mule,

looking towards the merciless,

gates widened like a lion’s gape.

——

The city of peace swallows him whole,

breaks his skin with brutal flogging,

nails him to wood for hungry crows,

fearing his selfless love of the poor,

unknowingly sows his body and heart,

as he gracefully accepted human pain

showing that heaven’s love is like grain,

down in the grace turned earth,

that essence dies in the darkness,

and extravagantly grows

an hundredfold and more

to shake our conscience,

open our purses, teach us

healing, work for a kingdom

where common good is the

key.

Brexit’s Legacy

Startled by swiftness of the grievous downturn,

he stood looking at his terraced house, once warm,

once welcoming and in his hands were bulging bags,

and his children playing their games on tech screens.

Weary from work he held the bag from the Foodbank,

and felt again the creaking of a body underfed and

——-

prayed the government would not abandon them.

——-

Entering the cold hall, no cooking smells to warm him,

his children already huddled in their coats and blankets,

watching their hour of the tele, all computers traded 

for cash to pay dark electricity for a moments necessity

and his wife gone to hospital  for a long awaited treatment

her beautiful body broken by the corruption of cancer.

——

Bubbling beans filled the damp smelling house with joy

as the children ran to collect clean plates and cutlery

tummies rumbling with juices racing to collect goodness,

and send it tumbling around their cold wasting bodies,

He set out their meals of bread and beans and craved

his own stomach shrunk by the steely, power grabbers. 

——–

Sitting together  in the dimness of street lamp lit room,

he held her frail hands in his own brick roughened,

and together they calculated what was left while

a smart metre tricked them  and became a liability,

she besought him to eat bread and beans to be able

to continue to have the means to avoid their liquidity.

Budgets Kill

Blue eyes sunk in a worried face,

dim with the ache of hunger,

closing to hide the horror of

cruelty in power and control.

——

Brown ones too in the faces

of children understanding 

that they are voiceless and

that loving adults voted for

—–

this annihilation, bold policies

that take their food, warmth,

their schools, jobs and hope

and create fat cats, and pigs

—–

that grunt and snuffle in the

decaying detritus of their 

lost lives,  painting with

their blood an enthralling

—–

idyllic picture of a trickling

stream of quickening money 

but block it, subvert it, to sell 

the oppressed for a fevered

—-

obsession with giving money, 

and more money, and misery 

money, for fancy, future jobs 

to their backers and bankers;

——-

who invite them to parties where

the poor are absent, the climate

crisis is chalked over and the

opposition groans and fights

——-

each other, while the despot

in Number 10 has easy days,

creating her queenly kingdom

where only the elite live well. 

Do they even care?

Sewage on our beaches

government beyond our reaches,

history did not teach us

and now they cling like leeches,

—-

feeding off the poor, 

slamming shut the door,

hunger comes with a roar

and they say they’re sticking to the law.

—

Crisis costs will rise, 

Will they hear the dying sighs?

Will they finally raise their eyes?

And free them from wealthy ties.

—-

Money goes into their coffers,

and kindness will make offers

of tins, beans, tea against the scoffers

and cars driven by chauffeurs.

—–

Shivering inside from all ills,

chemist can’t get the right pills.

Climate crisis worsens and kills.

Who can save us from their selfish wills?

Cancerous Greed.

He held tightly to the statement of his wealth

groaning as he saw the fulsome figures falling,

wondering how he’d keep his balding head up 

as he flounders int he dust of only multi-millions.

—–

She held tightly to the small wad of new notes,

freshly received from the ATM and felt thrilled 

to have earned so much money, enough for rent,

food, that school trip and perhaps for electricity.

—–

He hungrily looked in the window, watched them

serving meals  on clean plates, smelling the eggs,

bacon and feeling in his pocket the cold hard

edges of coins, too small, too few, for their food.

——-

She cast a glance up to heaven, grateful to find 

cheap meat, beyond its date, good enough for

her thinning children to be able to eat tonight,

taking a bag of sprouting potatoes, she’ll eat too.

—–

She calls out for her Gucci bags and perfume,

her Gabanna dress hung in silk folds over her 

perfectly surgically sculptured slim body, no

not worrying about money, the servants do it all.

————

A mother collects goat droppings as gold,

and sets them before her starving children,

others cook leaves, stripping the trees to

stay another day of death stalking their lives.

——-

Billions it cost and all just to own the bird

that talks of matters best left unsaid, there

instead of giving the poor a chance, he’s 

egged on to feed the greed within himself.

——-

He works in government and knows only

the hard working wealthy folk around him,

cannot imagine eating bad food, searching

hotel waste and never having their choices.

——

A cancer is working through the weary world,

causing lasting pain, loss, hatred and fear,

teaching a few how to take more and more of

their unfair share and hide the starving in

plain

sight.

The Poor paying for the Rich

He looked into his wallet and then into the face of his children.

Oliver looked out from their faces, thinned and paled by hunger,

Their sad eyes looked at  under woolly hats and coat covered arm hugs.

—

His eyes watered and his empty belly grumbled as he opened

the last dull can of beans, cut the crust of curling bread into two,

watched the food disappear into hungry mouths opened like nesting chicks.

Not far away, plates were full with succulent salmon, rare steak, 

beef, chicken  vegetables, fried potatoes and mashed spuds, followed

by golden custard, french named cakes, apple pies and salted chocolate ices.

—-

Somewhere a mother scraped small crumbs from her sons bowl, sucking

them from the poor plastic spoon. In her head imagining the eggs tomorrow,

when the reduced Universal credit arrived, a meal, heat, then rancid bin search.

Not far away, a kitchen door ajar, while out of date food is thrown away,

in the waste; while far away, the icy hearted are having a party at number 10,

half eaten rich food slipped in a bin. They take from the poor to give to the rich.

—-

Clean, loved children crying themselves to sleep, hunger gnawing at their vitals,

holding onto the hope for tomorrow they’d be in heaven, food galore at the FoodBank,

bringing home food in plenty to be eked slowly to cover the schoolless, foodless weeks.

Miles away lives a callous rich man who can choose to give them enough or kill

them slowly by starvation and a rich woman minister who chooses to treat them as 

alien pariahs, ignores the council of the wise, ignores deadly hunger, abuse and trafficking.

—–

Truth may come, but already the lies hold sway, the government culled the media.

So, how will the hungry children have their voices heard? The starving, the weakened

the oppressed, hidden from sight, are crying out, lost in the lies trumpeted out by Tory press.

======

Yes, minister, the numbers in poverty are atrocious 

but we are doing what we can, watch us.

We’ve paid the rich and they are wealthy too. 

Tis tricky, the trickle down effect?

‘It won’t.’ A lie from long ago. 

The poor are always with us – but they

don’t

donate

to

our

party.

Breaking the poor to pay the rich.

There, in the place of privilege and parliament,

she held the flame high. And showed clearly the

darkness that assaults the poor and divided David 

Cameron’s almost managing ’til their larders are 

emptied of succour and their frightful futures fixed

with a hasty handful of wealth cultivated wishes. 

——-

Although this time the poor are paying for the rich,

their fingers in frayed pockets for rich folks’ care,

their homes will go while bloated pockets only pay

for their own pleasures and privileges, homes in

exotic islands, money in expat banks. All are

taking the bread out of the mouths of little babes.

———-

The light will always shine in the darkness and 

the truth will always out.  Turning the lives of the

wealthy patrons and persons of high living into

questions;

and levelling up will become a torrid

affair where polls are lost and a new party born.

Tears

I bit into my chocolate, and the thoughts began to percolate.

I tasted the milkiness and bittersweetness and sighed and

cried inside my body – where the need’s nourishment not this

punishment as the weak, hungry child in my mind’s eye dies.

—–

I do not mean to deride the pride we have in our great nation,

as we cut back the giving so that our living can survive the

incessant drive of disease and wasted chances in warped

circumstances yet still the wasting child in my mind’s eye dies.  

——-

I once spoke with someone who had no bread, his children

not fed, and, “I’’m outside the human race, my family thin of 

face. The swollen bellies that you see on your tellies are 

emotional damaging, physically challenging and I have no

——

way to feed, I cannot sow seed that greed has taken on land

that is stolen.” It is a mystery that in our history we repeat it

over and over again. The poor are pushed aside while lying

governments hide their routes to wealth which scour out

—

the pots of poverty. 

COP26 and the voice of the poor!

Their home was bleak and emptied of all the webs of life that hold us together,

seated on the dirt floor they drifted in their thoughts while holding hands,

their bulging bellies swollen with starvation were moving beyond the human

need of hunger and care,   to a place where they lay down and let the life

ebb from them, hoping they would be lifted to a place of peace and plenty.

===

A few folk were trying to raise the remaining childer but they themselves,

were failing now as the sickness spread and stuck to their fevered frames;

leaving more of the little ones to fend for themselves, in a world that has

forgotten how to care, choosing eyes closed to the crumbling children’s lives

as they opt to stop their financial aid but not the brutal interest on deadly debts.

===

The weakened economies of world race to forge new pathways, and every

one misses those who live on the edge of a precipice of pain and hunger.

The small sons and daughters orphaned by the pandemic do not have 

any choices and their frail bodies, wearied by working long hours for a

pittance, would cry if they have a voice, ‘Help us with your billions and

—-

instead of flying into space give us enough for a meal, clean water

and a place to sleep safely.  Help us you who fund political parties

whose propaganda enables an agenda of propagating poisonous lies,

that wealth is to be garnered instead of food and money to be grown

in burgeoning bank balances in place of medicines for those without.

Christmas Threatened- Bah Humbug ?

She reached for the plain bread to lay it out.

One slice each with beans off a far Foodbank.

The disappointed children eat without pleasure,

and look with eyes that show meagre years 

of Tory rule. 

====

The face of plenty stares at them from the news-

paper stand – jolly eyes like Santa with a twist 

that is more like Satan. The little ones go to 

bed and hunger for tomorrow to be school, 

free meal fed. 

====

Crumpled faces of adults who see their kids

starving are fury whipped as they hear the

politicians think Christmas will make it well

while each day destroys their little ones

health and hope.

======

Bold figures with blind eyes, and deaf ears

to the cry of the poor, talk of turkeys and

the poor cry for bread and this time there

will be no knitting because they cannot 

afford the wool.