hope a partition, loss after loss; genocide, a planted drug epidemic, but my elders have hope. indescribable willpower fueled by grief and burden because enough is enough, no more empty politician promises. the land of five rivers shriveling, yet now they want to take our farming? my elders ache in the cold streets of Delhi as weeks long on. the MSP on the brinks of collapsing, and livelihoods hanging on by a thread but they still have hope.
While writing this poem, I was inspired by how Warsan Shire tackles difficult subjects that hit close to home in poems such as What We Own and Home. Through her poetry, Warsan Shire highlights struggles of her people and takes a personal approach. I find hope to be a common theme in her poems because it allows for a strong willpower. To me, the farming protests taking place in India currently are what hit home. In my emulation, I tried to use techniques I found in her writing such as repetition, parallelism, questions and carefully placed punctuation to highlight my voice. To give you a little bit more background, farmers in India are currently protesting laws that would place agriculture in the hands of multi-billion dollar corporations; leaving farmers to fend for themselves. In my poem I mentioned MSP, the MSP (basically a minimum wage for farmers) is not a hundred percent guaranteed under these new laws. This would make it difficult for farmers to make a liveable profit as they are already enduring mounting debt, water shortages and droughts.