Living in the Slums by Sophie Rees

The children assemble, waiting for the truck,

Scrambling over rubbish, hoping for luck,

The timeless minutes waiting for their fate,

It’s been hours and days since the children last ate;

They hear the truck not far away,

The children stand silent with nothing to say,

The rubbish arrives and they all start to run,

Flesh on flesh in the hot, burning sun;

The realisation that there’s nothing to eat,

Just scraps and bones without any meat,

Their final actions as they start to walk back,

Back to their homes with an empty sack.

I thought of this setting for the poem when I looked at the words ‘flesh on flesh’ and ‘waiting for their fate’ from 'Auschwitz' by Elizabeth Wyser. They made me think of the children fighting in the rubbish just to find little scraps of food for their families. I put in the idea of a red colour running through my poem as the hot sun and the flesh made me think of that colour. I put a performance element into the poem by suggesting sounds like the sound of the truck and the absolute silence of the children waiting for the rubbish truck.