The Forgotten South by Georgina Jeremiah

The wind burnt branches sway in the South.

Why won’t rain fill in the desert lands mouth?

The deeply tanned children drag their worked feet.

Whilst the river flows far but the children never meet.

The mud huts protect them from the noises in the night.

Why can’t someone help them with sympathetic sight?

The innocent children have terror of realisation.

That they may never gain help from their Northerly nation…

In this poem I have conveyed performance with a call and response, one line is read and then a rhetorical question is asked by another speaker. In the next verse, the same technique is used but no question is asked in the second line. However, the poem returns to normal by the third verse and this pattern repeats itself. I have displayed the colour theme of brown as in each first line an object is used to represent that colour, apart from the first line in the last stanza where the overall idea is shown. My poem questions the thoughts of the reader when asking rhetorical questions and it connects emotionally, making the reader feel guilty but appreciate that they live a rich life or at a standard better than the one shown in the poem. I have used a rhyming technique which causes the poem to flow.  The overall idea of my poem is that children in Africa are deprived of food and water and no other country is willing to help them, they feel alone and frightened of what might be out in the bare plain lands, repetition is used with the rhetorical questions which keeps refreshing the readers mind that something could be done to change the situation.

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.