The Goddess of Poverty

 by Brett Rutherford

     After Theognis, Elegaic Poems, 267-270

Take any floating thought.
Raise its first letter up.
Lo! Thought becomes
    a goddess, throned
    at the right hand of creation,
just as mere sunrise,
     an everyday event
becomes Dawn
     with rosy fingers.

What then of Poverty?
She is well-known enough.
The dictionary spells out
just who and what she is,
yet everyone you ask
says she is somewhere else.

She is nowhere worshiped
at the marketplace. Wall Street
falls silent at the mere utterance
of her name’s first syllable.
The court does not acknowledge her
though Justice meted out
seems corollary. Seek her
in dungeons or in debtors’ jails,
even among the desperate
who sleep beneath bridges,
in vain. Who has two shoes
and nothing else to cover
his nakedness says, “Ask him
with only one shoe what
Poverty is all about!”

No temple, no altar, not even
a single nub of a carving
with eyes the size
of sesame seeds
or a gaping, toothless hole
where hunger emanates —
she is a goddess of nothing,
a nullity.  Spinster, specter,
scorned everywhere, crone
of the averted eye, who
will raise up a shrine to her?

She takes the hand
of those who die unshriven.
Hers is the arm
on which one leans
on the road to Hades,
as the dead man looks back
to see the inheritors fight
over his left-behind treasures.
And she is there,
when the soul of one murdered
and secretly buried
arrives with no coin
for the somber boatman.
From her own purse
she offers one penny
to pay his passage.

She is the Goddess of “over there,”
the guardian of the town’s bad parts.
Her signs are the averted gaze,
the pointed finger.
There — See! Her face
among the crowd of immigrants
at the barbed-wire border.

If you have lived at all,
lived really and truly
you once, or more than once,
broke bread with her.

She merits an ode at least.