Poem by RD Armstrong

​The Spinning Plate of Hunger

When I think of hunger it's usually in terms of the most innocent –
the babies of the world. Babies, be they black, white, pink, brown, yellow,
tan, even blue, no wait, blue babies happen when hunger wins. When they
loll in mother's arms covered in flies with their little eyes glazed over in
Africa or India or some other foreign land, flies feasting on their
innocence but always somewhere else, never here!
Not here in the good old USA [it can't happen here] oh but yes it can!
We pride ourselves in maintaining a higher quality of poverty than the rest of the world
As if one could quantify suffering per capita, as in “what level is your hunger today?”
We are conscientious about records keeping, quantifying, measuring, comparing...
we don't know much about this disease but we have lots of data.
One thing we do know is that

Hunger is a constant, no matter what diseases are making the rounds

Hunger is a spinning plate that no food can ever stick on, a plate
that must keep spinning come hell or high water. It's our cross to bear,
our national obsession. But what good is a plate if you can't get the food to stay on it?
What kind of a joke is this? Nobody around here is laughing.

RD Armstrong from California, USA has been serving the muse and poets everywhere for 25 years. He writes, (tho poems are few and far these day). He publishes others and himself. His Lummox Press (https://www.lummoxpress.com/lc) is almost as old and has published some 200+ titles. Because he is a loner, all this remains a big secret that only a few poets know about.  

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