My Mother’s Warning
By Josephine Ansumana, Freetown, Sierra Leone.
My daughter: “Without social affluence and
Economic wealth, the world disregards
The value and dignity of the human being.”
But always remember that though emotionally
displaced and sometimes internally shaken,
The poor are real people-real human beings.
They have feelings, emotions and dreams too.
Poor people are the world’s dispossessed,
Fanon’s “Wretched of the Earth.”
The blight of social justice,
The cancerous lesion that plagues the world,
The tumor on the spin of world economies,
The social eyesore of world politics,
They are the growing voiceless and faceless multitude,
Locked outside the social and economic pale,
Like observers projected unto a callous cold world,
Mere statistics in the international arena,
Usually referred to, with a raised eyebrow,
An “afterthought” in pitiable footnotes.
Their existence a “social mishap”,
To a morally bankrupt world,
Their mere presence a mortal injury to world leaders,
Their plight a callous blot on world conscience
The bane and scourge of “proper society”,
Poverty is the worst form of human degradation.
It reduces its victims to indignity,
And sub-human status.
Strips its victims of all human dignity,
Respect, concern and consideration.
Above all, it saps at the victim’s self esteem,
Drags them to the baseless level of an animal,
In most cases, the domestic cat and dog,
Are treated with more dignity, respect and
Consideration than the poor human being,
Who becomes an object of disgust.
Poor people deserve respect, not pity.
They deserve dignity not disdain,
But above all, they deserve a badge of humanity,
For carrying the world on their shoulders.
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