Poem by Mandy Macdonald

National Geographic

There are countries
where people are afraid of cameras.
Taking a photograph is theft
of the soul, they say,
and hide their faces.
Imagine yourself, then, a ragpicker,
foraging away your starving days
in garbage dumps, for something you can eat,
something you can sell, perhaps,
to ragpickers less destitute, less hungry than you
by a fingernail’s thickness.
You catch a stirring in the rancid air:
is it edible? No, it is the flapping, still-bright pages
of an old, tattered magazine. You cannot read the date
nor any of the words, even if
they were written in your language.
You are only a girl. But you cannot escape
(even looking at them sidelong)
the pictures: emerald forest canopies,
sparkling arctic wastes, suntanned dunes,
strange, glamorous animals, paradise birds
outglowing the ashy detritus grey.
And suntanned people too,
lazing at picnic tables piled with food.
You let the gorgeous colours ooze
into your mind and your senses
until the rotten dump smell becomes the rich scent
of fruit, of spiced, grilled meat skewered over embers --
and then you see the page with
the stick-thin girl stooped, sifting landfill,
face on the crinkled paper turned away,
hidden by hair the colour of hunger,
and you know: she is your image
she is yourself
your dirty
                 shameful
                             discarded

self
Such a person could not have a soul to steal.
Everything has been stolen from her already.
Your spirit shrinks from the devil paper, fails.

THEME: Hunger and Women's Work

---

Australian poet Mandy Macdonald lives in Aberdeen, Scotland, trying – with diminishing success – to make sense of the 21st century and its discontents. She has worked for NGOs addressing human and labour rights and gender equality internationally. Her poems appear in many anthologies and journals; she has published two pamphlets – The temperature of blue and The unreliability of rainbows – and is currently preparing a collection. When not writing, Mandy sings and gardens, sometimes simultaneously.

---