Poverty consumes families

By Tim Trenkle

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Her toenails were pink but the enamel was chipped and worn. Her tan sandals were torn and her blue dress was loose as if she found it in a bin at a secondhand store, but her face was young and her hair shone.

The black-haired woman, about 20 years old, stood between glass-topped counters. She seemed to be a cherub at a communion rail, waiting on a wafer, hoping for a sign, eyes intent and lifted up, for hope is a tantalizing aspect of life, sometimes a shadow on a distant trail and sometimes a flame.

She carried a gold necklace and a cellphone. In a tiny box were other jewels and jewelry. A bid for freedom had been foreshadowed in her approach, and the pawn broker quieted as he strode to gaze upon another sad story in a litany of sad fables in the age of trampled dreams.

The moon was a sliver of light in a pale sky that morning as it broke across the threshold of the Dubuque pawnshop. If the moon is amore, the poor are more bereft of affection than ever.

Poverty is a killing field. It consumes children in dark forebodings and removes life's energy from their play. In the neighborhoods of the poor are broken bottles, broken sidewalks, broken windows and broken dreams. Health care is depressed, education has less quality, alcohol and drugs are more prevalent and violence is more frequent. Generations pass. The poor pass along mangled and broken hopes to their children.

The poor watch the liberal cry foul and listen to the conservative cry independence. They know the world builds itself up on their backs. They know poverty does not

go away. The war on poverty failed. The Bible tells of a man who was hung on a cross, whose sole mission was to walk among these, the less fortunate, the poor. The poor have beatitudes but little else.

“I can't give you much for your stuff,” the clerk said, and he smiled and behind the smile was sadness, too.

He looked at the necklace. “It's just twenty-four pennyweight, not much,” he said.

“I need four hundred,” she said and the man drew a breath and said, no, he couldn't do that.

“I need it for my rent,” she said, and the weight of the world then tucked itself onto them.

“I can give you $150 for everything here.”

Her rent was due in a few days. Every penny counted and she accepted. She thanked the clerk as she walked out. She didn't cry now but kept her head up and walked in the same silence that the poor hold, on her way to a cross, somewhere, on a hill, somewhere, alone.

Tim Trenkle of Dubuque teaches psychology and writing at Northeast Iowa Community College and is a freelance writer. Comments:

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