STREET PEOPLE
Phil Roberts 1957 (Melbourne)
Street people wander
Outside in the winter cold,
The unemployed, the heart-sick
The feeble and the old.
Street people are starving
Desperate for a little help,
But Canberra turns a blind eye
And says, "Go and help yourself!"
Street people are freezing
On winter nights outside,
We push them out of sight
And hope, at last, they'll die.
Street people pleading
For help; but do we really care?
We say, "We'd like to help them"
Yet we leave them in despair.
Street people are dying
For want of basic needs,
We claim we'll help them one day
But they're dying from our greed.
For one day never comes you know
We'll never really help them now,
But still, we leave them out of doors
To die out in the snow.
Street people are desperate
Just for some basic human rights,
But in Canberra, they don't listen
To tales of people's plight.
In Canberra, they rug up warm
Indifferent to the winter cold,
So street people living outside
Have to die before they’re old.
THE END
© Copyright 2021, Philip Roberts
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
About this poem
About the inhumane way in which Canberra treats street people.
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Written on 2008
Submitted by PHIL_ROBERTS on July 20, 2021
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 57 sec read
- 3 Views
Quick analysis:
Scheme | XAXA BXCX BDEC BFXF BXXX GXXG XXXE XADA XXX |
---|---|
Closest metre | Iambic trimeter |
Characters | 1,012 |
Words | 186 |
Stanzas | 9 |
Stanza Lengths | 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 3 |
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"STREET PEOPLE" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 28 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem/105340/street-people>.
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