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Hunger Poems

You are encouraged to read the poems posted here from national poets 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 Bruce E. Whitacre

2/27/2025

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On the Oreo

It lies in wait like a cockroach on my counter, indestructible,
Evolutionary titan, alien artifact, blue wrapper,
Black and white graphic, imprinted since infancy,
One fourth of a day’s calories in six bites, Big Food love child.

It was a pity buy off a brown-skinned, mute mother
Surfing the subway with her box of stale treats.
Blasting from the next car, babe wrapped to her chest,
Her passage crafted us a sandwich

Of annoyance/anguish/annoyance, choking complacency.
I resist looking. I imagine myself
She beseeches but only with her hungry eyes
As she sways to the world’s harsh rhythms.

Has no one told her these plastic treats are toxic?
A class of people living behind their walls,
To which I too often aspire, won’t touch these brands.
While for those living outside such walls, they’re just another day.

When did my favorite after-school treat, so perfect
With a glass of milk or Kool Aid, become a brick in that wall?
Once the only controversy was whether to bite down as is,
Or split, lick and chew. Bible School was riven by the question.

Or there’s the taunt of racial sincerity,
“She’s just an Oreo.” That caustic metaphor chimes
Sharply off the world’s most popular cookie,
First engineered in New York’s Chelsea Market

Before its later heydays of trans hookers,
Drug dealers and now Google. No longer
Made in the USA. Contains a bioengineered food ingredient.
Trans fats or not, here it is, badged and blue, in my kitchen.

​A glass of milk. My little brother and me,
Breathless after our games. We each take three,
Dividing the package equally, as we do our chores.
Oh, blue devil, if I thought I’d die tomorrow, you’d be my last.

Picture
Good Housekeeping, 2024 from Poets Wear Prada, a BookLife Reviews Editors Pick and placed 3rd in Poetry at The BookFest Fall 2024. The Elk in the Glade: The World of Pioneer and Painter Jennie Hicks, Crown Rock Media, was also a BookLife Reviews Editors Pick and placed 2nd in Contemporary Poetry at The BookFest Spring 2023. Richard Thomas has narrated the audiobook version of this title. Whitacre’s crown sonnet about the culture of violence won the Nebraska Poetry Society’s 2023 Open Poetry Contest. His poems have appeared in many anthologies and over thirty five journals. He has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net. www.brucewhitacre.com.

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Poems by Bruce E. Whitacre

9/4/2023

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Cinnamon and Famine

After forty years of badges, cubicles and 401 (k)’s
all that one does and all that is done to one
your privilege is ground fresh beans and yogurt
cold boiled eggs in a sunny window.
Bills and sick calls crowd your plate.
But under the placemat bleeding mouths
seep their crises onto the table
aroma of cinnamon and famine.

​The kitchen floats in migrant waters.
Juice is the red of the shot boy’s blood.
How not to starve when every meal is stolen?
How to fill the cruel void of thoughts and prayers?
Surrender and the paralysis seizes you

Plums and the Boy from Syria
Villanelle

The chroniclers agree it came from ancient Syria,
That tart staple of jam and pie, the Damson plum.
It blooms by the roadside, same time as wisteria.

The chroniclers record how my son fled from quaking Syria.
He wound up a lifeless little boy afloat in the scum,
Drowned after boarding a sinking raft of diphtheria.

All he sought were the roadsides bordered with wisteria,
A land of bread and plums, where he could overcome
That gnawing void of his belly, or murder by bacteria.

The chroniclers agree he had to leave burning Syria.
Strafing and round-ups, bombed-out home, worse to come:
Parents shot, family gone, terror beyond all criteria.

Down the roadsides blooming with wisteria
Drive the ministers, the committees, all aplomb,
To meet and decree, again, an end to this hysteria.

​The rescuers sweep our bodies from the area.
We parents and our kids drown fleeing a gone home.
The chroniclers shrug or push the blame onto Syria.
Bitter plums dot the roadside, among the wisteria.
Picture
The Elk in the Glade: The World of Pioneer and Painter Jennie Hicks is a 2022 Publishers Weekly Editors Pick and won 2nd Place at TheBookFest 23. Good Housekeeping is forthcoming in 2024. Publications: The American Journal of Poetry, World Literature Today and more. Anthologies: I Wanna be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe (Eric Hoffer Honorable Mention), The Wonders of Winter, and The Strategic Poet craft book. More at www.brucewhitacre.com.

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    Suggestions & Ideas

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

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  • Home
  • About
    • About the Initiative
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    • Recipients and Donors
  • Hunger Poetry
    • e-Collection
    • Hunger Poems
    • World Food Day Poetry Competition >
      • 2021
      • 2020
      • 2019
      • 2018
    • Maryland Poets
    • International Poets
  • ART
    • ART Inspired Poems
  • News & Blog
  • Young Poets
    • Poems by Young Poets >
      • West Side Campaign Against Hunger
    • 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
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