The Impoverished Beauty Queen
There walks the
Impoverished
Beauty Queen,
The lissome,
Long-legged lass,
With size zero,
Collecting the items in the garbage bins,
Littering the rich urban streets;
The thin rag-picker
Wearing faded clothes,
A bursting haversack
Bending her back slim,
The tall woman,
Tousled brown
Matted hair,
Sunken cheeks,
Listless eyes,
Parched lips.
Still managing to
Walk with pride and feminine grace,
Amid heaps of domestic waste,
Where the well-fed and obese will
Never venture out;
That her fields
Where this hard-working
Unseen creature gambols easily,
Picking up the discarded piece after piece,
In her junkie husband’s eyes,
She is no less than any
Upper-middle-class,
English-spouting,
Fair-complexioned,
Rouged,
Starved-slim,
Freshly-anointed
Beauty Queen.
The only difference—
And that counts,
Says the abusive man,
These spoilt dolls walk the
International ramps for money;
My queen,
The coughing and often ill,
Walks the
Mountains of garbage
For
Her kids anemic
And,
Her lord and master—
That is,
Me.
Destiny Poets
Uniting and celebrating the best "Writers" and "Poetry" from around the world centred out of Destiny Church Wakefield
Acutely,almost forensically observed poem which for this reader lays bare the present day predominance of consumerism and the fetishisation of individuals,.i.e.”the beauty queen”, as if social individuals were constructed outside of the social relations of production and consumption themselves in some idealised state.
More than my poems, I enjoy the intellectual import of your erudite comments, O, Great Louise Kasatkin!
This poem at once cools the mind because of it’s no-nonsense approach to an otherwise make-believe world of nouveau riche.Very matter- of -fact.
Thanks for such cool comment, dear Lokesh Roy.
Extremely engaging poem that stays with readers for long.
Thanks a lot, Nalini, for your appreciation.