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Hunger Poems

You are encouraged to read the poems posted here and elsewhere on the

Poetry X Hunger website, to look  
at 
the historic accounts of hunger,

famine and starvation, or consider the ​prompts suggested and then...

​write some poetry about hunger.
 

Poem by Martha E. Snell

12/20/2020

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Atrophy in Madaya, Syria

The grandmother refuses morning meal today and
yesterday. Again tomorrow. The young ones
must have more in their bowls she says.
The bag of rice flops over, level
of bulgar falls. She ceases eating,
moves only in planned ways.
Two neighbors die, the ribs
of her grandchildren
are outlined
in flesh.

Kwashiorkor, I have to look it up, hear it
pronounced, until I remember pictures
of children from Biafra, Vietnam, the
Holocaust, this famine and that,
further back than cameras.
Images show flies on their
faces, swollen bellies,
listless people
who wasted,
vanished.
​
The moon in daytime
spirals across the sky,
little noticed.
​
Click on the file below to listen to Martha read her poem:
jamestown_dr_2.m4a
File Size: 724 kb
File Type: m4a
Download File

Picture
Martha E. Snell's poetry appears in or is forthcoming from journals such as Ninth Letter, Moon City Review, Cutthroat, The Poet's Billow, and Streetlight Magazine. She received the Mary Jean Irion Prize from Chautauqua Literary Arts Friends in 2015 and was a finalist for the 2015 Bermuda Triangle Prize (The Poet's Billow) and the 2019 Patricia Dobler Poetry Award.  A professor emeritus at University of Virginia's Curry School of Education, she earned an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2015 and has since completed two residencies at the Vermont Studio Center. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.

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Poems by Linda Trott Dickman

12/15/2020

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For The Students For 60,000 On Their First Trip to Nicaragua
For Pete White, and all those students.

They got off the plane
stuffed with good intentions
ready to change lives
make bricks
build houses
teach lessons
feed the hungry

The trash from the last of their snacks
disposed of responsibly.
Next stop was after the bumpy
unpredictable ride.
The expectations of primitive
conditions, unfamiliar places
to relieve their bodies,  rest their heads,
Unfamiliar cooks, bellies used to plenty,

met by very excited children.
One weary traveler remembered 
there was one more snack in her bag.
She pulled out two oranges.
The ones she had been saving for herself.

such a sad offering for the small group.
Before she could make a decision
one spirited boy grabbed one.

She watched open mouthed 
as he painstakingly peeled back
the covering, carefully dividing
this juicy treasure among ten.

She wasn’t hungry after that.

©2021 Linda Trott Dickman
Click on the file below to watch the video:
pxl_20210929_202945851.mp4
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File Type: mp4
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​The Hands That Prepared It

For Priscilla Drake Solomon
For all those for whom a crust is a feast
​
She started from a full heart.
Mixed all the elements
Kneaded, working her floured quilters hands
Into the dough, folding shaggy into smooth
Sticky into soft.

Working into a promising mound
Covering with a cotton shroud, 
Letting the dough ferment

Reshaping,
Dividing, cross sectioned
Tucked into bundles
anointing with butter
Cover once more

Rise again like Easter morning.
Bake, remove from oven
deliver with warm wishes
kind words.
A starter for so much more.
Click on the file below to listen to Linda read the poem:
linda_trott_dickman_the_hands_that_prepared_it.mp4
File Size: 6435 kb
File Type: mp4
Download File


For all those still seeking a good meal in the dust.


If the chicken knew what lifted her, 
she could not say, 
strutting in the sun, 
looking for food, then
propelled across the farm
into the dark.

1.
Incredible luck.
A murky tidal wave crashed
across the plain.
I saw it coming,
closed all the shutters.

It looked like the judgment,
dark powdery angry rolls,
rushing toward me.

My defense as effective as my
six year old fighting to bite a thin carrot
with two front teeth missing.

A rust colored film
breaking in to the smallest crack,
the slimmest crevice,
coating everything.
The winds sixty miles an hour or more.

I was grateful my Billy was in school,
they had a storm cellar.
I got that call before the cacophony of the heavens.
The sky now the color of melting Baker's dark chocolate.
And then it was over. 

I heard the cluck and looked twice;
there stood a plump white Leghorn wearing a rusty coat.
Dinner!
Family too thin, eating the last of the root vegetables.
A miracle!
The chicken looked dazed, I wasted no time.

It was a job lifting my eyelids, lifting my arms was easier.
The dust gave me an edge, a better grip on the twiggy legs.

2.
He heard it too. Hungry, out of work,
on the road for days, he started past the house
he needed water, he needed food.

He saw the hulk of dust approaching,
ran for the barn.
This farm had nothing
more than he had left behind.
Undetected he climbed aloft
Listening to what sounded 
like a dump truck was loosing its load overhead.
He waited till the soil stopped raining down.

When it ceased, he heard it.
A surprised cluck.

He would have kept going, 
but for that promising sound.

He heard the pursuit,
the capture
the final strangled cluck,
then the danse macabre in the yard;
wings extended, 
legs in a great hurry, rushing nowhere,
covering ground she had never covered in life.

He watched the woman drain, pluck, sing.
He heard “as I went down in the river to pray” coming from the kitchen.

I put the pot on to boil,
“studying about that good old way.”
Chicken baptized, rinsing the storm off the last of the turnips, onions, carrots, parsnips.
Peeling and singing,
“and who shall wear the starry crown, oh Lord show me the way.”

He waited. 
“Oh Lord show me the way.”
she moved a basket of laundry
out to the line,
the last of the elephantine cloud
lumbering away. 

Shaking the residue
loose from the line,
I lifted the sheets, towels
knowing it would be tomorrow's refrain, 
“oh sinners lets go down
lets go down, come on down
down in the river to pray.”
I smiled for the first time in days.

He whistled soundlessly,
picking up the air...

By the time I returned, more than the storm had blown by
the chicken
the pot
gone,
though he'd had the courtesy to turn off the stove.

If the chicken knew what lifted her, 
she could not say, 
strutting in the sun, 
looking for food, then
propelled across the farm
into the dark.
Click on this LINK to listen to Linda read her poem.
Picture
Linda Trott Dickman has been writing poetry since her first sleep-away camp experience when she was ten years old.  Linda is the author of Robes,  The Air That I Breathe and Road Trip. Linda’s poetry has been published on-line, in Pratik Journal and in several anthologies.  She is the current coordinator of poetry for the Northport Arts Coalition (Northport, NY.),  has taught poetry to children for over 35 years and leads a poetry workshop for adults at Samantha’s Li’l Bit O’ Heaven coffee house in East Northport, NY.  ​

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Poem by Anne Harding Woodworth

12/15/2020

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FAMINE
​

    . . . the body is dyed
    by illness like a piece of cloth
    by an extraneous color.
            —W.G. Sebald

The dyer makes the linen
a deeper color of dug earth,
boils it in water with acacia
until the natural mole’s-back gray-tan
becomes peat-bog purple.

The well-fed lord is not pleased
with the linen’s new color
and wants it changed back.
The dyer replies that once a beginning unfolds,
recovery of what was is not possible.

And he feels helpless walking home that night
to his beyond-hungry child.
On a cot she lies fevered,
her hair fallen out, her mouth without saliva.

Transports come by every evening
to gather the dead, and they jostle
over the river to a far-from-town field,
where blackened by illness tubers also rest.

The dyer lies down next to his daughter,
and while she sleeps,
he tries to solve the undyeing of a piece of cloth.

from Anne Harding Woodworth,
Up From the Root Cellar, Cervena Barva Press, 2006


Click on the link below to listen to Anne read her poem:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/96j6z8srj1rrsg8/Woodworth%E2%80%94Famine.m4a?dl=0
Picture
Anne Harding Woodworth, author of
a sixth book of poetry, The Eyes Have It,
with a seventh, Trouble, coming in late 2020.

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Poem by Eileen Trauth

12/15/2020

1 Comment

 
Famish

On the starving plate you filled a hungry
heart with empty food and left a hunger.

You served up soup instead of sympathy,
your way to say what still left a hunger.

You baked a bridge of bread that just revealed 
what you could not cross; it left a hunger.

You offered roast beef that never appeased 
a craving for words, which left a hunger.

You wrote letters with your meals, meant to speak
your silence. Unsent, they left a hunger.

Your dazzling dishes did not nourish; feast
turned to endless fast that left a hunger.

In stillness, as you passed the salt and we 
ate our détente, I was left a hunger.
Click on the file below to hear Eileen read the poem:
famish.m4a
File Size: 1410 kb
File Type: m4a
Download File

Picture
Eileen Trauth is an author, inclusion advocate and Emeritus Professor of Information Sciences & Technology at Pennsylvania State University. She has published ten nonfiction books, many articles and one play. Her creative writing includes poetry, historical fiction and screen writing. She lives in Cincinnati, Ohio. www.eileentrauth.com

​

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Poem by Argos MacCallum

12/15/2020

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Almuerzo

in the summer heat
halted by an insolent red stoplight
I see a man sitting on his haunches
on the opposite curb
of the t-bone intersection
compact dark and round-eyed

cradling a lunch on his knees
as solemn spoon rises to solemn lips
solemn as a state dinner
the curb a timeless throne
within an anthem of silence
an island in the roar of the world

a feast of rice and beans no doubt 
fit for both fisherman and pharoah
spoon rises and dives like a bird of prey
the cardboard bowl the living earth
the serpent of hunger is driven away
and won’t be back again today
Picture
Argos MacCallum is an actor, director, carpenter, theatre manager, and co-founder of Teatro Paraguas, a bilingual theatre company promoting Latinx plays in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  He has lived the past 50 years in his homestead in the shadow of the Cerrillos Hills off the Turquoise Trail outside Santa Fe, where the coyotes party all night long.

​

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Poems by Naima Penniman

12/14/2020

1 Comment

 
Listen to these powerful poems by Naima Penniman, program director of Soul Fire Farm. As written by Naima:

"This is poem I wrote and performed that speaks to hunger: These Gardens Are Blueprints
Video: https://youtu.be/KcL1wlC7-rM

Here are 2 other poems you might enjoy:
Being Human - Mama Nature's mirror
Video:  https://youtu.be/EdMHqjN4Wtw

Black Gold tells some U.S. history of the food system and land justice through the voice of the soil."


Picture
1 Comment

    Suggestions & Ideas

    Take a look at some of the writing prompts to get inspired!

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    Poets

    All
    A.G. Kawamura
    Anne Harding Woodworth
    Argos MacCallum
    Blair Ewing
    Brenda Bunting
    Brian Manyati Aka Towandah Ryan
    C.C. Arshagra
    Christopher T. George
    Cliff Bernier
    Debbi Brody
    Dee Allen
    Don Hamaliuk
    Dorothy Lowrie
    Ed Zahniser
    Eileen Trauth
    Elise Power
    Emily Vargas-Barón
    Eric Forsbergh
    Evan Belize
    Gayle Lauradunn
    Glynn Axelrod
    Grace Beeler
    Grace Cavalieri
    Heather Banks
    Holly Wilson
    Jay Carpenter
    Jay Carson
    Jefferson Carter
    Jeffrey Banks
    Joan Dobbie
    J R Turek
    Judy Kronenfeld
    Julie Fisher
    Kalpna Singh-Chitnis
    Kari Gunter-Seymour
    Kathamann
    Kim B Miller
    Kitty Cardwell
    Kitty Jospé
    Laura McGinnis
    Linda Dove
    Linda Trott Dickman
    Lindsay Barba
    Lisa Biggar
    Lynn Axelrod
    Margaret Brittingham
    Martha E. Snell
    Michael Glaser
    Michael Minassian
    Milton Carp
    Naima Penniman
    Nan Meneely
    Naomi Ayla
    N Chamchoun
    Philip Harris
    Robbi Nester
    Robert Fleming
    Ron Shapiro
    Sharon Anderson
    Sherrell Wigal
    T. A. Niles
    T.A. Niles
    Theresa Richard
    Tom Donlon
    Vickisa
    Vincent J Calone
    V.j.calone
    William Rivera
    Zane Yinger

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  • Home
  • Art Auction to Alleviate Hunger
  • Hunger Poetry
    • Hunger Poems
    • World Food Day Poetry Competition >
      • 2021
      • 2020
      • 2019
      • 2018
    • Maryland Poets
    • International Poets
  • About
    • About the Initiative
    • Initiative Founder
    • Advisory Board
  • News & Blog
  • Young!
    • Poems by Young Poets
    • Videos
    • Materials for Teachers
  • Library
    • Extent of Hunger >
      • Global Hunger: Progress & Challenges
      • Hunger in the US
    • Historic Accounts of Hunger >
      • Africa
      • The Americas
      • Asia
      • Europe and Russia
    • Historical Poems
    • Interviews
    • Recent highlights
  • Contact/Submit/Take Action
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Call to Action
    • Resources & Donations >
      • Global resources
      • US resources
      • Maryland resources