Vox Populi
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Arlene Weiner: Poverty Festival
It probably shows a poverty
of imagination that when I misread
New York Poetry Festival as
New York Poverty Festival
I couldn’t imagine how to celebrate poverty,
even though I’ve been to a Beckett Festival,
which is similar, and have seen
a banner beside the roadway
advertising North American Martyrs
Summer Festival, but that’s just the name
of a Catholic church bazaar and Catholics
are good at marrying suffering
to a good time or at least
to junk food and games of chance.
At a poverty festival you could display
color photographs of cracked sidewalks, weedy yards,
you could sing songs about sickness,
about waiting, about eating the same thing
day after day, and every day less and less,
you could make dances about being too tired
to get up but getting up anyway and working,
and falling down working and getting up again,
but celebrations of hardscrabble lives and places
celebrate despite, except, escape
Does suffering enable or ennoble
or is it just a field where nobility
flares out like poppies in wheat
and the field is leveled and owned
and now I think about it
a poorer person might think, Poppies?
You can’t grind poppies into bread.
Copyright 2017 Arlene Weiner
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