An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum
This poem was written by Stephen Spender, a guy with an extensive rap sheet in the genre of politically and socially inclined commentary. I'm not entirely sure when he visited the slum that this poem is based in, but he has such a melancholic way of describing things that, I am forced to conclude that this happened at a time when conditions were devolving faster than people could try to remedy them, and all that without any help form the authorities whose iron fists seem to rule these places, even through the dust choked air and the cheap squalor! Now, the poem begins by painting the portraits of the children. They are located rather inland and, subsequently in a place that closes them off from the outside world in such a way, that even the gusty waves seem like fairytales, pointless and with fuzzy details. Most of these children look like the soil of a parched garden overrun with weeds of such a rootless nature, that even they cannot thrive there. The first child is a girl, tall ...