March 2013 Challenge Winners - Poems about Poverty

Rick Roberts, author of one of the March example poems judged the Poetry Challenge this month. When I asked him if he would do so, he commented on the subjectivity that is always involved in judging poetry, and added, Quite often a better constructed poem lacks the emotional impact of one that may be more raw and honest. . . .  The words that move me, that knock my socks off, will always carry the day with me.”

Roberts listed two poems as tied for second and third place, saying, “Both of these poems are full of subtle and forceful imagery. They were wonderful, each in their own way.” Here are the two runner-up poems:

Dead End Kid

          The photo on his bureau 

is studio-precise: Knickered.

Eight years old. Shining Irish face.

I see my father hidden here.

Long ago, this boy was posed in a fancy parlor

drawn down from a painted canvas roll—

He'd been dusted off, fussed over

like any robber baron's son

for this oddity-- a satin-lit vignette—

A boy standing beside a wooden chair.

Placed on the wooden seat there is

a small bouquet.

           It was slums that welcomed newcomers—

not Fifth Avenue mansions. My father's home

waited five floors up noisy tenement stairs. 

My father's tenement childhood ran with an alley gang—

kicking cats and heaving bricks before Rosary at bed.

His mother died sometime after her steerage voyage.

The aunts lived on, old maids, polishing

the mahogany floors and brushing the velvet

of an elegant age. They gossiped

over Venial Sins of both rich and poor.

But it was Mortal what they did to him—

They told the boy "The Drunkard" was dead.

At eighteen, my father met his father

in a box at an Irish Wake.

           My father's childhood hovers

in family shadows and the shallows

held by an antique camera lens.

I understand the Friday drinking and the Irish Luck

that trapped him here, going silver 

with the small bouquet on a wooden chair.

~ Francis Toohey

Francis Toohey is a painter and writer working in Mexico. His chapbook, The Household, was published in 1989. Goodfellow Editions is publishing a full volume of his poems entitled The Great Gods later in this year (2013).

Paradise…Paradox

She stands in the midst of the busy road

all 40, maybe 50 pounds,

wind from passing vehicles blowing her threadbare dress.

Hair and skin the color of dessert and dust,

distant brown eyes

hardly seeing.

She stands in dry heat, diesel fumes, and danger

at the curve while

vehicles of visiting gringos slow, then motor past

her arm extended to collect

coins thrown her way

into a cup.

Every day I see her from my safe, soft seat

en route to that day’s adventure.

Our driver quickly passes

the same dress, same cup, same eyes.

She stands and 

I wonder.

For months I’d saved my money to

Escape to Paradise!

Each day she seeks coins

and hope

and dreams to get away.

~ Katie O’Connell

Katie O’Connell is a writer,  educator, and enthusiast of all things creative. Having worked in the publishing industry as well as in the classroom, she has always loved words and writing, but only recently has dedicated time to refining and publishing some of my own creative works.

Now for the winning Poem:

Mathare

A city water spigot at the end of a narrow alley

Rusted bucket, grey rag

She shivers, she is naked

No sunlight reaches her between the cement block buildings

At ten years old, she is the size of a six year old

Can this small bit of water clean her body?

Can anything ever clean her emotionally?

The scars of abuse? Can they be taken away?

Tonight she will sleep under the eaves of someone else’s home

She may not eat until tomorrow

Yet now, now all she has is this bucket she found

This rag that she found which is as good as the clothes she wears

Day after day

Mathare

He must be tough

He must laugh with the others

Money exchanged for a small plastic baggie

Running, running, running

To the next hit and the next

Tonight he will sleep inside at least

On the cement floor, wrapped in the thinnest of blankets

Tomorrow he will run and run some more

So he can eat a piece of stale bread

Mathare

Tears run down her cheek

And drip onto her baby

He does not notice, he continues to cry

She rocks him and sings to him

This will not ease his hunger but there is nothing else to do

People walk by and don’t notice

Other babies cry today and no one notices

There are too many babies crying to notice

But, she thinks, this is my baby

My baby crying

A coin falls at her feet

And another

Thank you, thank you, thank you

She whispers

It has been days since she’s had a real meal

But now today her baby can have a bite

Tomorrow may not come

She can feed her baby today

Mathare

~ Chris Kincaid

Roberts said this poem "left me breathless." He described it as “Raw and amazing.  Full of immediacy and all the desperation and agony of its vision.”

Kincaid wrote, “When I was in Kenya on a mission trip, one of the places we visited was Mathare Slum. The poverty there was so overwhelming. What can one person do to help any of these orphans or widows? So many pictures from that day remain vivid in my memory. The young girls sell their bodies and the young boys run drugs. HIV-positive women who have been widowed or abandoned by their husbands do whatever they can to find food for their children.”

Her memoir of this trip, A Time for Every Purpose Under Heaven, shares the efforts of those who are trying to make a difference in the Slums of Nairobi. The book is available online at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble and Life Sentence Publishing. There is a Kindle version, in addition to the paperback book. You can find out more about the author on her blog at chrisloehmer.blogspot.com.

Congratulations to the three poet winners this month. And thanks to Rick Roberts for judging the contest and to the other poets who entered the challenge contest.  The poets published on this blog retain copyright of their own poems.

Check back on April 1 for the new poetry challenge.

© 2013 Wilda Morris

March 2013 Poetry Challenge: Poverty

This picture shows the stone bridge mentioned in the poem by Peter Ludwin.

The world’s great spiritual leaders—Buddha, Isaiah, Jesus, Mohammed—for Instance, have taken a special interest in those who are poor, and have entreated their followers to be generous to the needy. Poets can handle the issue of poverty in many ways. There is a risk of moving past sentiment into sentimentality, of going into the opposite direction, into insensitivity. The form a poem regarding poverty takes depends on how the poet encounters it, and the poet’s ability (or inability) to identify with those who are poor.

I was raised in a family which was on the line between “lower middle class” and “upper lower class” (to use the language learned in schoo). There was an obvious “pecking order” in elementary school, and I was aware I was close to the bottom. One year, a child who was much more economically deprived than I joined my class. I was immediately aware that I got picked on less as she was picked on more. I felt relieved—and guilty for feeling relieved.

My first encounter with extreme poverty came when I was on the debate team at American University in Washington,D.C. We participated in a tournament in New York City on a bitterly cold weekend. One experience I had that weekend has had a life-long impact on me. It was years after the experience that I wrote the following poem:

Feet on the Subway

His coat was ragged

as his face. His worn hat

and threadbare gloves

could not protect him

from the icy cold racing

through the wind tunnels

of New York City.

Probably he panhandled

coins to ride the subway.

My eyes were drawn

from his drawn face,

his recessed eyes,

to the skin of his ankles

stretched tight and red,

his puffy feet, pressed

into loafers, the newspaper

stuffing visible through

large holes in the soles.

I shivered less from the cold

than the coldness

with which I stared.

I reached my station,

rose and left the subway car.

I took his feet with me.

Look, the swollen ankles,

the newspaper-stuffed shoes

are still stored

just behind

my eyes.

~ Wilda Morris

This poem, which was first published on the website of the Evanston. Illinois, Public Library, and has been republished several times, focuses on the impact of the experience on the narrator.

While I was in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico, earlier this year, I purchased a copy of Atención, a local bilingual newspaper. It included a poem by Rick Roberts. His poem focuses on the interaction between the narrator and a woman who sits on the sidewalk begging for coins:

For a Peso

  As I was walking the streets of San Miguel
I saw a twisted old woman half sitting,
           half lying on the sidewalk,
 I stopped to drop a peso In her basket.

      As I bent down, she looked up,
her eyes probing mine, pulling me
              into her very being.

Did I see the mother she had once been,
 her children now scattered and lost to
                             her?
  Had she once been someone’s bride,
          some young man’s passion?

   Had her body always been broken,
or  had she run with her friends laughing
                    in the sun?
   Had she ever been carefree, giggling,
   sharing her dreams and her longings?

  Had she held the hands of her brothers
                  and sisters
     as they skipped across the plaza?
In her long life had she ever felt safe,
          sheltered, and wholly loved?

           Then I saw in those eyes
   that she had been all those things.
               Was all those things.
                  Is all those things.

       As I finally released the coin
       into her basket, she smiled
  the sweetest smile, said “gracias.”
Then released me to my passing self.

~ Rick Roberts

From For a Peso, by Rick Roberts. Also published in Atención, January 4, 2012, page 17. Used by permission of the author.

Peter Ludwin who goes to San Miguel de Allende every winter, developed some degree of relationship to a street vendor named Carmela. Carmela was not destitute as the man on the New York Subway or the woman described by Rick Roberts, but her economic means were obviously limited. Perhaps I have a bias in favor of this poem because I stayed in the same posada in San Miguel, and also purchased gorditas from Carmela. I’m also impressed by the way Ludwin broadens the focus of the poem to include historical and socio-economic factors. The images and metaphors in this poem are also strong. Unlike the two poems above, this poem is addressed to its subject.

Existential

Every winter when I return to San Miguel

I find you in the same spot

under the little stone bridge: Carmela,

the gordita woman, a mestiza crone

one step removed from the shriveled Indian

begging in a doorway like a starving bird.

For thirty years you’ve made empanadas

filled with cheese and hot chilies

on your comal, hand dipped in a bucket

of tainted water I ignore. What are you

if not the chime of the tolling bell?

Mexico’s true constant, a blue feather

waltzing with dust? Revolutions, coups,

cartels—they come and they go, rank winds

that sear the eyebrows and ravish unsuspecting nuns.

You remain, the lines and folds of your skin

the paths of ruined armies, of obsidian blades

and Spanish bayonets kicked up by a plowing mule.

Once, coming down from the Andes,

an old man asked me What is your faith?

I knew what he wanted: that identity card like

American Express. Inconceivable

I would ever leave home without it.

A casualty, that faith, like so many others

in the course of learning to stand naked.

More reliable those simple things that anchor

the common rhyme: a rooster, a bougainvillea.

And you, gordita woman?

I believe in you as others believe

in Exxon or the New York Times,

the way I used to believe in the Lone Ranger,

a masked redeemer unscarred by doubt,

a range rider whose shirts never creased.

What I see is what I get. Digging for change,

you feed me in places neither of us

has drawn on our worn, tattered maps.

~ Peter Ludwin

From Rumors of Fallible Gods (Rockford MI: Presa Press, 2013), pp. 36-37. Used by permission of the author.

About the poets:

Rick Roberts lived in Camano Island, Washington, for twelve years before moving to Mexico. He found his poetic voice in San Miguel de Allende, near the age of 69.  He believes both truth and music are the essential elements that bring power to words. One without the other leaves us feeling, somehow, incomplete.” (NOTE: The poet named Rick Roberts who has a website is a different Rick Roberts).

Peter Ludwin is a folk musician as well as a poet. He regularly participates in the San Miguel Poetry Week (see http://www.sanmiguelpoetry.com/ ). He has received prestigious awards, including a Literary Fellowship from Artist Trust, second prize in the 2007-2008 Anna Davidson Rosenberg Awards, and two Pushcart Prize nominations. His poems have occurred in numerous journals, including Nimrod, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Comstock Review.

More Poets on Poverty:

Carl Sandburg, “Old Woman” - http://www.quotesandpoem.com/poems/SelectedPoemByTopic/Sandburg/Poverty/OLD%20WOMAN/61

Jane Taylor, “Poverty” - http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/182540#poem

Hayden Carruth, “Notes on Poverty” - http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/182319

Henry Lawson, “Poverty” - http://allpoetry.com/poem/8446423-Poverty-by-Henry_Lawson

Langston Hughes, “Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria” - http://www.quotesandpoem.com/poems/SelectedPoemByTopic/Hughes/Poverty/Advertisement%20For%20The%20Waldorf-Astoria/71

Robert Service, “Lottery Ticket” - http://www.quotesandpoem.com/poems/SelectedPoemByTopic/Service/Poverty/%20%20%20%20Lottery%20Ticket/288

Ella Wheeler Wilcox, “Poverty and Wealth” - http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/ella_wheeler_wilcox/poems/17143

Poetry Challenge for March 2013: Poverty

For the March challenge, write a poem about your encounter with poverty (your own or someone else’s) or, more broadly, about poverty as a social issues. No poems that belittle those in poverty will be considered.

How to Submit Your Poem

Please put your name at the bottom of the poem (note the format used above). Poems published in books or on the Internet (including Facebook and other on-line social networks) are not eligible. If your poem has been published in a periodical, please include publication data. Poems submitted after the March 15 deadline will not be considered.

If the judge or judges for the month do not believe any poem submitted is quite good enough, no winner will be declared. Decisions of the judges are final.

Send your poem to wildamorris[at]ameritech[dot]net (substitute the @ sign for “at” and a . for [dot]). Put "February Poetry Challenge" in the subject line of your email. If you want a bio published with your poem should it be a winner, please include put a brief bio below your poem. Submission of a poem gives permission for the poem to be posted on the blog if it is a winner. The deadline is March 15, 2013 (Central Daylight Time). Copyright on poems is retained by their authors. 

© 2013 Wilda Morris