Poverty is all pervasive dreariness.
It swallows you up and spits you out into the fringes.
It sucks you of energy,
fills you with dread,
tampers with your spirit.
Poverty is a skinned carcass left on the platter,
surrounded by grizzled crumbs.
Empty glasses once filled with wine,
smeared with others greasy fingerprints.
A life lament set in dim lights, scored by false hopes.
Alone in a crevasse with nothing but slippery ice to hold onto.
Poverty doesn't have to be such a monster.
We can view it in another light.
We could see that poverty is a place of learning.
We can surround it with a parachute of colours.
We can hold hands to share energy,
to shoulder burdens,
to arouse our spirits.
We can fill the platter with nourishing compassion.
We can sip from a smiling friend's wine goblet.
We can look to the stars to shine our way,
And to the moon to bless us with hope.
And then, we can grasp onto the rope to climb out of the crevasse.
Holding onto eachother as a community of richness.
If we want to............
7 comments:
beautiful ...
and what a pic ...
i should have borrowed it for my last post :D
god embraces poverty.
ditto what bono and urbs said.
and yes, this was beautiful
thank you.....the words were generated from a great discussion on poverty with a group of frontline workers I'm working with this week. it's a week of learning and touching base again with other dedicated staff who work and live trying to help and understand poverty.
Monk......yes He does......and was thinking that when I sat down to write last night. God's lesson is one we all need to embrace and to act on...
That's a good one, and yes, ..."IF we want to".
I believe that everything in our lives is a choice - OR - the r4esult of previous choices.
Oooh, I wish I had read this exquisite work of poetry before our six-year-old began hammering me with questions about the homeless.
Our kids have such good souls that sometimes it kills me to explain why, despite everyone'd best efforts, some people still sleep on the street and don't have enough to eat.
I wish their sense of idealism would always stay whole. I hope they can make the difference where earlier generations have failed. I hope my adult's sense of cynicism doesn't snuff out the light of hope in his huge blue eyes before he's old enough to tru.
Hi Judy......I don't know where i stand on the choice thing these days. Most of the time I believe our choices lead our circumstances, but then I start to wonder if some things happen with no connection to a personal choice.......I guess no matter what happens......we can decide how we react to it, to the best of our ability at any given time.
Carmi....thank you. it blows my mind actually that poverty is rampant in this country, and that we have some even as I write this who are trying to find a warm spot for the night...
I have been helping my daughter with a speech she has to make next week for a class assignment. It's an annual competition thing at her school. This year she decided (a couple of months ago) to write and speak on extreme child poverty. her new awareness has generated many conversations and questions as she tried to absord the information she was gathering. I will post her thoughts next week after she has completed it.
It's difficult to answer the questions coming from an innocent, though my kids have been made aware early on simply because of the work I do. It continues to be a balancing act as to how much "reality" we share with them at various developmental/age levels.
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