Who Will Feed Us?

The king died, then the queen died
Of plot. There’s a tale. The wife

And son of the man who farmed
A plot of rice in a drought,

Or a field of wheat turned rust,
Or fruit trees torn by a storm,

Who then lay down on the tracks
Next to his small plot to die,

That’s not a tale. It tells us
What we all know in our guts,

What the wife and son know now,
Who stand by the road and beg—

None of us are kings or queens
In the end—not kings or queens

Or the folk who starved for them.
We need food if we’re not dead.

In the end, that’s all there is.
If you can’t eat, you can’t live.

Your cells eat the air you breathe.
I wish I could give you names

For this, but I can’t, not here.
If I said who the king was,

Who was the queen, the smeared corpse
On the tracks by the bare field,

The son, the wife left to beg,
The next thing you know, we are

All back in the pot of plot.
Who will eat us? There’s a thought.