With this poem, I was thinking about the murals in The Mission area of New Orleans, which I saw while on holiday a few years ago. Many spoke about the displacement of people due to rising rents and life becoming less affordable. I wrote about it when I got back in a poem called Murals. So many people became homeless. And then I started thinking about gentrification and changing neighbourhoods, and just how expensive things are becoming, and how many people can't afford what they used to.
Gentrify and displace
This is the coming circle, time-in,
the balance, rebalanced, timed out;
wretched egg. Grey tenements pour
stern brickwork etched, lines of lives.
Words pounded out upon blank walls
call out the politicians who disregarded
while neighbourhoods got ejected,
words strewn on dollar bills blowing,
unspendable. Hoisted, they spin on air,
bought out, sold out, played out.
Where people can’t afford to spend,
we see exile. Homes perch empty,
remembering voices, bodies, love;
does anyone have a heart to say?
A blue teddybear sits on a throne
ungoldened as concrete seeps years
of solitude, full wrung out it seems.
Placards bellow of rising rents
and faces stare blankly in between.
We can ill afford this gentrification.
The launderette spun its last,
now sits a barber’s red velvet chair.
People lounge, shed their despair
as the man cuts hair, hoovers up.
Developers stride in, saunder out,
and clothes spill from windows,
the wind a giant washer/dryer,
a recycler of our former selves;
lives we can ill afford come winter
with its etched-on coldest days.
Words made of ice can only melt
with no cap on poverty’s misery.
Copyright Vickie Johnstone, May 4, 2021
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Thanks, Brian. Cheers for visiting :)
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