Vision, a poem by Heidi Mitton

Vision

Static gazes and
blown-up bellies surge
onto plasma graphics,

Sound-bite limbs and
torturous flies
salt-soaked semantics urging,
be full of thanking it’s not you,
not us:

and please give

cash to sponsor the stolen seeds
backhoes to
­ hijack the groundwater, send
your Christ, droning on
­ that some god somewhere loves
while Man looks, turns His lily white cheek, and forgets

Send boots, books and blackboards
to stamp out the land and smarten the metals
to train hearts
to pay mind

 

We doze in the brawn of this hunger. We learn it.
We recite it.
We take stock in its growth but still
we never touch it.    Each numbered limb

drowned out
and uncounted.

 

Heidi Mitton’s Vision is one of nine poems we will publish during the remainder of the year. It was selected as a result of a call for poems we issued in May.

Heidi Mitton is a mental health therapist originally from Truro. She has been living and working abroad over the last few years with humanitarian and human rights organizations in Jordan, Colombia, and Guatemala.

She writes: “The inspiration for this poem is hard to explain, but the attempted focus of most of my writing is perhaps best summed up by this quote from Alice Walker recently sent to me by my grandmother, who has been encouraging my writing since I was seven years old: Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution and the raising of consciousness.”

 

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