The Marketplace of Hunger
“Can poems fill the stomach?”
—What a question! One that nearly eighty percent of poets hear at some point.
But did poems ever promise to feed anyone?
Their only vow was to touch life through language.
Then why are they now birds with broken wings?
Even I no longer dream of setting them free—
of opening their cages and letting them fly into the sky.
In return, they too do not tempt me
with the glitter of an advance from a publisher.
Has poetry outlived its need in our time?
The question startles me.
But wait—perhaps that’s true.
The innocent, helpless words must be sitting somewhere,
thinking quietly among themselves.
All around—galaxies, endless galaxies.
I can’t help but laugh,
seeing that artificial sky—
for my poems live in the real universe.
When they descend,
they come by the true windows of being.
I’ve checked—these digital windows are not mine.
Neither my portals, nor my cosmos.
And so I return—
not with a full belly, but with a full heart—
to my poems.
I tell them,
“Even if you don’t sell in the marketplace of hunger,
know this—
you exist, and will exist—
so long as humans remain human,
and not androids.”
