The
Tuesday Poem this week is ‘The Votive Angel’ by Moira Wairama.
Says TP hub editor this week, Andrew Bell:
Why
this poem?
Like myself, Moira Wairama is a socially and politically conscious writer, and, try as we might, we cannot help our world-view from seeping through our creative work. At the last election I worked for the Electoral Commission on Election Day as a polling station worker and I was appalled to find that only 30% of Aotearoa's eligible voters bothered to get off their couches and go down to their nearest Polling Station and exercise their democratic rights.
There was no dictator oppressing them, there were no snipers firing at them from rooftops and they didn't have to walk through a desert for hundreds of kilometres and stand in a queue in the hot sun for hours in order to vote. They didn't have to cast a vote that was a meaningless charade like the poor people of Zimbabwe who get only a corrupt, power-hungry madman who squanders the country's diminishing wealth while his people starve and barely eke out an existence on $2 a day.
I feel incensed that we take our freedoms so lightly. In fact, I'd like to dedicatethis Tuesday Poem to the memory of Tarek al-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor who set himself on fire on 17 December 2010, and with this desperate act became a catalyst for the Tunisian Revolution and the subsequent spread of the Arab Spring.
We should count our blessings every single day that we don't have to emulate Bouazizi's act of self-immolation to bring about a change of government. I can't say it any better than Moira's Votive Angel: "Vote, you Apathetics."
Like myself, Moira Wairama is a socially and politically conscious writer, and, try as we might, we cannot help our world-view from seeping through our creative work. At the last election I worked for the Electoral Commission on Election Day as a polling station worker and I was appalled to find that only 30% of Aotearoa's eligible voters bothered to get off their couches and go down to their nearest Polling Station and exercise their democratic rights.
There was no dictator oppressing them, there were no snipers firing at them from rooftops and they didn't have to walk through a desert for hundreds of kilometres and stand in a queue in the hot sun for hours in order to vote. They didn't have to cast a vote that was a meaningless charade like the poor people of Zimbabwe who get only a corrupt, power-hungry madman who squanders the country's diminishing wealth while his people starve and barely eke out an existence on $2 a day.
I feel incensed that we take our freedoms so lightly. In fact, I'd like to dedicatethis Tuesday Poem to the memory of Tarek al-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor who set himself on fire on 17 December 2010, and with this desperate act became a catalyst for the Tunisian Revolution and the subsequent spread of the Arab Spring.
We should count our blessings every single day that we don't have to emulate Bouazizi's act of self-immolation to bring about a change of government. I can't say it any better than Moira's Votive Angel: "Vote, you Apathetics."
Readers
will find the poem and more about the poet at the Tuesday Poem site, here: http://tuesdaypoem.blogspot.co.nz/
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