To know the empty, the nothing, the starving ache, Is to breathe, to love, to reach and break.
To know the hunger, the barren, the freezing chill, Is to eat the last, the stale, no waist, and love it still.
To have so little, is the agony of more, to feel the thirst, Is to have it all, to use each piece, is to persist.
To devour so little, to this is life, to await loss and mischance,
Is to see what I am and how I pain, but to be unknown at your glance.
To be love, to be loved, to have trusted affection, Is to dream, is to be perfect, is to be imperfection.
To ingest the pain of neglect, to expect the sting of betrayal, Is to be my same, is to discover it is real.
To your eyes, that does not see, to you I say and beg and plea, This is the gospel I do unfold but wonder if it is clear to the.
To share the equal, hated fear of torment, to affect your life, I have doubt, Is that unless you know this foul truth, I regret to say, you live without.
Tina L. Hendricks 2019
Thank you for reading this poem. My goal for writing it was to capture the unexplainable feeling of being poor as a child and then not anymore as an adult. Poverty hurts in many ways. My family was money-poor, food-poor, and love-poor. Not that I wasn’t loved, I was. It’s just that our family’s love was not happiness. Our love was riddled with war, tears, sadness, infidelity, addiction, lies, depression, and selfishness.
Ther painfull ache for food is similar to the ache for love. Yet, in surviving hunger in the sense that you didn’t have enough food in the house nor regularly planned meals, you develop a keen survival skill. I describe this survival skill as an unwavering knowledge of conquering and defeating a death-defying stunt. I am stronger because of it. Therefore, I have built my life to be what it wasn’t in my youth.
I have power so many people lack. The power of a feeling of not being poor anymore. It is very hard to describe but those of you who have been there and have risen above it know what I am talking about.
Besides food, what are you hungry for?
I have known people who grew up poor who could never shake the childhood mindset. They would binge every time a paycheque came in and buy up everything they could for fear of losing that money immediately or having it taken away from them. You seem to be connecting with that fear.
I’m writing a memoir called, The Collector, which chronicles how I have learned to deal with emotional terrors. The terror that comes from poverty but also the kind developed due to other familial ailments. Maybe someday it will be published. There is an excerpt from it here on my blog. Thank you for your comment and for reading Hunger.
373134 969750Wow, amazing blog layout! How long have you been blogging for? 995239
Thank you so much. Only been blogging for a few months. I find it very freeing. Thanks for the shout out.