The cold chocolate crystals,
Clinging to the silvery spoon in lethargy
Are nothing but superfluous.
Miles and worlds away,
A dark skinned child weeps,
Her tears more salt than water
And her limbs jagged lines of bone
Twisted into the human shape
A single bowl of ice cream is nothing,
Here, it is an afterthought,
A pause,
A comma in the sentence.
The girl in Africa can count her ribs
And her backbones, but not past ten.
The endless lines of formulas
Make my head beat its own drum,
While she can only think starving
And wonder without answers.
She often drifts past the skyline
And dreams of a world where
Her mother smiles back from death,
The earth blooms tranquil green,
The gunshots fall away
to peaceful mute.
Here we tick our way through days
And curse the master clock,
But never know the rhythms
Of hunger,
Of hope.
And I feel that I can see her eyes
Searching my face in daydreams
Begging me to keep fighting
If only to give her something
To hold on to,
When even cheap fantasies
Of foreign ice cream
Can't hide the truth anymore.
***
I might go further into the background of poems that are more abstract, but in my opinion this is very straightforward. Basically, I had a moment, like I think we all do, when I realized that whatever I was complaining about at the time, there was someone whose life was a lot worse.
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