This Dying Earth

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Back to Mom's Poetry
Poverty
Criticism
Room and Bored
Back to Nature
Oil Pumps
The Pictures
What Can I Say?

Poverty

You've never known the strain of life, the struggle to exist?
You never had to scrimp and save and toil with calloused fist?
You never tasted hardness? Oh, how much you've missed!

You say you never soiled your clothes, your hands no dirt did mar?
You've never fought the elements, and have no wounds, no scar?
You've always had life easy? My, how poor you are!

You never worried, never wept? No burdens do you lift?
You never had an enemy, and ne'er a parting rift?
Your heart has not been broken? Well, you've never lived!

©Lorna Whitelaw, 1932
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Criticism

This is an hour to be critical,
To take selective tweezers, and to grasp
The public figure meant to represent us all:
Dissect his words, slice superfine his acts

And place them in the light of studied thought
As 'neath a microscope, and single out
This careless attitude, that shaded turn,
As tissues, cells and germs that bode disease.

This is not time for tolerance or love,
Nor gentleness or patience; it is time
For surgery, implacable and swift,
Or liberty be forfeit.

But it is easy to be critical,
To form the habit of inspecting flaws,
And overlook the good; to be unaware
Of forces that already work to cleanse
And isolate and neutralize and purge
The offending act; to raise a hue and cry
Upon discovery of every wart
Or mole or tumor or offensive smell,
Perhaps malignant, but perhaps benign;
Until the cries of "wolf" raise no alarm
And bring no aid.

God grant indeed the strength to meet the test:
To root out evil, worm and wasp and nest;
And also patience for the harmless pest.

©Lorna Whitelaw/Anderson, 1963
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Room and Board

The night was wild without.
The house was dull within.
My hound-dog snored and I was bored.
The fireplace log burned out;
Still raged the blustering din
Of storm outside; the last spark died.

The telephone! I rushed
To quench its startling peal.
"Is that you, Ed?" "Wrong house," I said.
My book remained untouched, unwanted now. My zeal
To read was dead.I went to bed.

The darkness surged around. The rain stopped. No more sound.
I counted sheep and fell asleep.

©Lorna Whitelaw/Anderson, 1975
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Back to Nature

They make it sound so easy:
stalking the wild
harvesting free
mixing your own.

Long ago I knew a man
who talked like that.
He had a cabin by a lake.
Let's get back to the simple life,
he said.

His woman grubbed the soil
and pulled the weeds
and picked the fruit
and stoked the fire.

He listened to his crystal set
and paddled the canoe.

©Lorna Whitelaw/Anderson, 1970
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Oil Pumps

Up and down
like giant carrion in the fields,
they suck the blood of prehistoric forests
and rotting dinosaurs.
Between their claws they spew and spit
the foul black mucus
into troughs and tubes
that bear it to the flames
that heat the blood of pale and fearful man,
who cries for "More!"
struggling to survive
upon a dying earth.

©Lorna Whitelaw/Anderson, 1980
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The Pictures

The photos of the southern isle
never showed the heat.
The pictures of the northern woods-
wildflowers, stream and fishing rod-
were silent on the subject of
mosquitos.
Where grass was green, who thought
of hidden slugs?
In fields of sugarcane,
of scorpions?
On virgin slopes of snow,
who looked for signs: Beware
of Frostbite?

For better or for worse, they said.
The pictures only showed
the better.

©Lorna Whitelaw/Anderson, 1980
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What Can I Say?

What can i say to you?
Where do the words come from
that choke my gorge with sheer inadequacy?

I saw. You did not see,
could not imagine through your rosy-tinted,
quite aseptic scented plastic shades

I try to show you pictures-
you turn your heads away.
You cannot stomach
the offensive grime before your eyes.

If you could smell the stench
(as I have done)
of drought and hunger,
vermin and disease,
your gorge would retch as well.

That those same haggard women,
bleak-eyed infants, crippled fathers
could eat and thrive, and smile and grow
on rice or beans in scanty servings,
bread and tea and little else-
is unbelievable!

What we can give is trifling, but enough
to turn our little sacrifice to bread,
our every reach a miracle of hope!

Open your eyes! Forget the grime!
Come, lend a hand to reach and help!
And when you've shared their poverty
You'll never have such joy!

©Lorna Whitelaw/Anderson, 1991
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