We are delighted to showcase one of 2024’s Secondary Poetry entries. Below are the inspiring words of Emily Ng from Villa Maria College. This poem was performed as spoken word poetry at the Speaking 4 the Planet final’s day in Christchurch.
To starve is to be: planet B
Our ancestors made this world beautiful, their magnum opus,
corseted her to man’s delight.
They branded luscious crops into her earth, smoothed whenua with organic riches
and yet, ripped bodies of fruit and flesh from the loamy ground,
butchered food on death row conveyor belts,
until we couldn’t taste it anymore, couldn’t distinguish nature
from narcotics.
processed their “perfection” into protesting mouths,
never stopping to set a limit, to put an end, to this mass production.
The numbers were too large to ignore. The numbers said it for us.
100,000 tonnes of rotting food sang through pits in bellies.
Aotearoa’s food insecure 15% whispered pleas through minds.
The world’s hungriest screamed to us like mic feedback.
So the media began preparing us for the new world, and as children, we watched, glassy-eyed.
Wave after commercial wave of new celebrities formed;
poster children of starvation, flaunting bubbling abdomens, bloated with the pride of the generations that made them.
Glamourous models poured into streets, born of names destined to make the front page.
Anorexia, Catabolysis, Sarcopenia.
Our forefathers led them, hand in hand, emptying their veins to the catwalks of flooded fields,
the concert halls of produce that would never meet lips,
stunted and sputtering, wasting into bloodied red carpets.
never stopping to set a limit, to satiate the ever-hungry mouths,
to put an end to it.
and as infants,
we watched,
glassy-eyed.
unable to walk away from our future.
Note to my child:
Decades from my adolescence, and days before yours, I held your hand in a waiting room.
Do you remember? We sat alone, bar one other.
An elderly woman; Silent was she,
Gazing at the cork noticeboard
And I’d be wrong to say
“I didn’t hold my breath” when her vitrified eyes fell
To the wayward magazine cutouts pinned in the corners
flaunting glamourous models, lying on the red carpeted steps
of concert halls.
To my child:
I remember laughing soft gasping breaths as you traced the felt of your seat.
I realised all in one revolution of the clock by the waiting room door
how new you must’ve felt to the carpet and ceiling
how all you knew about the world before you hung on the posters that hugged the walls,
Yet, you found more contentment in the worn upholstery at your fingertips.
In your simple gestures I saw rarities,
The gentle patience that my lips never inherited
The love for the immediate that my life wasn’t granted
The presence of hope, and an absence of hereditary wrath.
A freedom from man’s built-in desire.
And then I made a silent promise to fight this battle I rebuked all those years ago
not as a soldier or knight, but as a parent.
And as long as I possessed the strength to stand, I promised I would hold your hand.
my child:
Do you remember the moment in which
I made a silent promise, to the old woman at my side
And do you recall: the way she smiled
As if to say that we were only beginning to understand ourselves
As if to say that what’s mine is yours
As if to say a small part of a great burden
had been exhumed from the pit of her stomach.
child,
Tell me
Did you hear when I whispered to Papatūānuku with lips finally free from wrath
“O Mother, are we forgiven?”
And did you hear the slick glassy snap of our generational cycle when she breathed the answer:
“yes, my child, yes.”