The forgotten

Phil Roberts 1957 (Melbourne)



Just off Essex Street
The poor and aging die,
Forgotten by a government
Indifferent to their plight.

Not far from Melbourne’s CBD
Street folk die from frost,
The elderly, the invalids
The unemployed and the lost.

In a frigid Melbourne winter
The unemployed sleep outside,
Waiting for help that never comes
Expecting soon to surely die.

Forgotten folk deemed unimportant
By those who have the power,
The milk of human kindness
Most surely has gone sour.

So the forgotten freeze to death
Just a little off Essex Street,
‘We cannot give them jobs or food
And we WILL NOT give them heat!’

The forgotten have given up
What point is there to even dream,
For governments are surely death
To the forgotten’s mortal screams.

Who has hope in the City's west
Where governments have let them down,
And let them live and die outside
Just outside of Melbourne Town.

Yes, the forgotten have no reason
To continue their awful existence,
And so they hark to death’s loud call
To give up on life’s pretense.

THE END
© Copyright 2021 Philip Roberts
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
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Submitted by PHIL_ROBERTS on April 28, 2021

Modified on March 05, 2023

55 sec read
19

Quick analysis:

Scheme ABCX ADXD EFXB CEXE GAXA XXGX XHFH XXXX XXX
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 1,040
Words 185
Stanzas 9
Stanza Lengths 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 3

Phil Roberts

I turn 65 on the 31st of January 2022. I love cats, rock music, and horror fiction and poetry more…

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