Poems

Their stomachs growled loud as

gusts in the hurricane

When tears overflowed cheekbones

And low lying hopes they stood

against ten-feet surge of hardship

They see but just too weak from hunger

to protest or to speak up, poverty has cuffed their hands

and bound their lips, lips wanting to speak up against

funds disappearing quicker than they're donated

Could it be that they get a dollar,

from every thousand dollar

or for every ten cases of crackers,

only one gets pass slippery hands of packers?

How can poverty decrease,

when corruption doesn't cease

It grows as the cholera epidemic

Oh how their guts are wrung to expel what was ate,

Nothing.

Oh how their guts are wrung to expel mud cookies

of salt, vegetable oil, and dirt, to feed a monster; hunger

A hunger as real as the tears I shed

Hunger like shadow they take to school and bed.

Just how will this stain of poverty leave their clothes?

No clean water can wash it out

but it if could, there's not enough to go about

More tears in their eyes than clean water to drink

Satisfied by just the thought of food they think

Shacks supported by grass against the wind

As starvation feeds their heads to pound.

Light doesn't shine from the ground

May their heads be high

as the heat they face from day to day

Spending their days in the sun's radiation,

But the cancerous cells of poverty

are immune, just knowing reproduction.

How can poverty decrease,

when corruption doesn't cease

The cry of the Haitians, the cry of Jamaicans,

The cry of many nations.

- Sandre O. Lowers, 2016