Vox Populi
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John Guzlowski: Hunger
What My Father Ate
He ate what he couldn’t eat,
what his mother taught him not to,
brown grass, small chips of wood, the dirt
beneath his gray dark fingernails.
He ate the leaves off trees. He ate bark.
He ate the flies that tormented
the mules working in the fields.
He ate what would kill a man
in the normal course of his life:
leather buttons, cloth caps, anything
small enough to get into his mouth.
He ate roots. He ate newspaper.
In his slow clumsy hunger
he did what the birds did, picked
for oats or corn or any kind of seed
in the dry dung left by the cows.
And when there was nothing to eat
he’d search the ground for pebbles
and they would loosen his saliva
and he would swallow that.
And the other men did the same.
~~~
What a Starving Man Has
He has his skin. He has a thinness
to his eyes no bread will ever redeem.
He has no belly and his long muscles
stand out in relief as if they’d been flayed.
He is a bony mule with the hard eyes
one encounters in nightmares or in hell,
and he dreams of cabbage and potatoes
the way a boy dreams of women’s breasts.
They come uncalled for, round and fevered
like rain that will never stop. There is always
the empty sea in his belly, rising
falling and seeking land, and next to him
there’s always another starving man who says
“Help me, Brother. I am dying here.”
~~~~
Copyright 2017 John Guzlowski. From New York, My New York City: A Bite of the Big Apple
John Guzlowski was born in 1948, the son of parents who met in a Nazi slave labor camp in Germany. His books include Suitcase Charlie, a police procedural.
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John,
Your poems amaze me. Still me. Thank you fir them.
Carine Topal
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Oh what fine and horrific and true poems these are, John. How I also wish poetry could “end the terrible things happening.”
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Poems requiring a long breath, a long pause, and then another breath to live with the heartbreak.
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These poems are a truthful account of war and genocide. We are seeing it happening again now.
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What My Father Ate,This poem is really tear-jerking! I want to translate it into Chinese
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thank you for sharing the experiences of those who suffered in Buchenwald
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This is why I can’t follow so many friends’ lead and “just turn it off”. How can the rich amass more and more knowing people are starving? How can tyrants use hunger as a weapon?
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I, with so many others, appreciate your heart-felt comments. Please, don’t turn from this passageway
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I’m with you, Barbara. You have a big heart, especially for children. I admire your capacity for empathy.
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Starvation is certainly in the toolbox of tyrants. We may learn more of this close to hand in coming days. Best wishes to John Guzlowski. He knows and speaks of hunger from more than just the imagination. From the history of desperation.
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Exactly. Thank you, Jim.
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Wowser! This intense, fabulous poetry just keeps coming from Vox Populi. It truly is “voice” of our kind, as though no one involved in this is given to make light of our “attribute held in common.” Weapon, implement, device, garden tool, pleasure object, extra appendage, utensil, instrument, optic, silencer. All these in the hand of our throats/throats of our hands and we are here to listen and wield. John Guzlowski—and Michael Simms—How you have blessed our day.
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Thanks, Sean!
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thanks for reading the poems. I wish that my writing and your reading could end the terrible things happening.
we can only hope that someday it will change.
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Here’s images doing the horrible beautiful work of telling what starvation is. These are powerful and literally gut-wrenching. Fine work John Guzlowski!
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And appropriate for our time.
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For sure!
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thank you.
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thank you for reading about my dad and the experiences of those who suffered in the war.
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