Kathmandu
InNovember 1994 I went on a Nepalese trekking adventure with my good friend the artist Phil Dutton. We spent the first few days in Kathmandu and as it was our first experience of what we now call the developing world I think it safe to say we were both shocked by the filth and squalor that many humans are forced to live in. I wrote this poem in response to the feelings it gave me.
Kathmandu
Kathmandon’t
Filthy people in filthy clothes
Filthy streets with filthy shops
Filthy bloody goat heads on the chopping block
Filthy children with filthy bare feet
Filthy water; be careful what you eat
Don’t come here for a holiday
You’ll think it’s cheap but you will pay
Auto-rickshaw fumes choke, pollute
Roaming cows are sacred but not to me and you
Beggars beg displaying unbandaged, festering stumps
A man with no eyes sits begging by a dump
A woman in rags sitting on the ground
Nursing her youngest as squalid older ones surround
With no hope, no hope, no hope at all
At very best they’ll rise to run a tourist trinket stall
Or if they’re strong and determined they can go off to the hills
To carry rich trekkers’ bags and earn a porter’s spoils
Third world, fourth world
It makes no difference here
Life is hand to mouth
To starve is a real fear
Let Nepal change you, they say
Don’t change it
It’s changed me to see such poverty
I don’t want any part of it
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