Hungry Night Poem by Prabhakar Subramaniam

You begin to hate food

If you have gone to bed hungry,

With the home coffer,

Rice vessel empty,

With no vegetable

Not even a plantain left

In the house;

To quell the gastric juices

Slowly rioting

You pour water

Hoping to kill the secretion;

With the neighbourhood

Credit exhausted

The breadwinner has gone

To tap distant sources;

You lie down on the floor

Silently crying in the dark

Face averted from mother

Who had never let us starve

You wonder how long it takes

To die of hunger.