Exercise: Poem
I think the last time I read poetry was when my daughter had some homework for English Literature prior to sitting her GCSE’s – she’s now 21. As a young man I was taken by the war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon and also Rudyard Kipling’s IF. I tried my hand at William Blake but for all of my efforts his work might as well have been written in Sansrkit. So, it was that I turned to an old favourite; Benjamin Zephaniah.
Money make a rich man feel like a big man
It make a poor man feel like a hooligan
A one parent family feels like a ruffian
An those who have it won’t give you anything
Money makes your friend become your enemy
You start to see things very superficially
Your life is lived very artificially
Unlike those who live in poverty
Money affects your ego
But money brings you down
Money causes problems anywhere money is found
Food is what we need
Food is necessary
Let me grow my food
An dem can eat dem money
Money can save us
But yet we feel doomed
Plenty money burns in a nuclear mushroom
Money can make you happy
Money can help you when you die
An those who have it continually live a lie
Children are dying
Spies are spying
Refugees are fleeing
Politicians are lying
An deals are done
An webs are spun
An no one keeps the third world on the run
An the brother feels better than the brothers next door
Cause his brothers got money an his brothers got more
The brother thinks a brother’s not a brother cause he’s poor
When a brother kills another that is economic war
Economic war we call it economic war
It may not be the east and west anymore
But the north and south third world far lord
Coffee an isle
That’s what it’s about
Economic war
Economic war
Shots fired from the stock market floor
So we work for a livin’
An we try an we try
With so little time for chillin’
Like we’re livin a lie
Money makes a dream become reality
Money makes real life like a fantasy
Money has a habit of going to the head
I have some for the rainy day underneath me bed
Money problems make it hard to relax
Money makes it difficult to get down to the facts
Money makes you worship vanity and lies
Money is a drug with legal highs
The parents of poor kids
Some are not coping
Some are just managing
Books that need balancin’ Property is theft
No money means death
You pay for your rent
An then nothing left
Some will pick your pocket
Some will pay to stop it
Those who will pay to stop it
They happy cause they got it
Some go out an fight for it
Some claim they got the right to it
An people like my grandparents
Live long but never side it
Money made me go out an rob
Then it made me go looking for a job
Money made the nurse
And the doctor emigrate
Money buys friends you love to hate
Money made slavery seem alright
Money brought the Bible
An the Bible shone the light
Victory to the penniless
The gospel shows us
We come to mash those market forces
The paper giant called market forces
I’ve always been taken by the honesty and sense of humanity in Benjamin’s poetry, but also his anti-establishment viewpoint.
I chose to illustrate the poem by focusing on a couple of lines from it that highlight the disparities between rich and poor. The first is the very first line of the poem ‘Money make a rich man feel like a big man’.
In the Eighteenth Century the pineapple was lauded by the rich strata’s of society to the point that they were shown off at parties as an example of a personal financial reputation. Often they were hired out to enhance peoples societal standing. Gold also acts as a symbol of wealth.
I next looked at the lines ‘You pay for your rent. An then nothing left.’ To me nothing represents poverty more than mould on the wall of a rented property. I think the images work as a set in representing some of the concepts within the poem. I had further ideas such as burning fake or play money; the use of poker chips to represent wealth or a trying to represent market forces by screenshotting analytical financial graphs presented in a multiple over-laid composite. In the end I was satisfied that two images were enough and that the use of direct flash also gave an aesthetic link.
Bibliography
Google Docs. (2019). Money-Benjamin-Lyrics+M-e-O. [online] Available at: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eHgzRUpZaIM_rrK_LVWM2GQsRo6izg55PyfmirF6o8g/edit [Accessed 19 Nov. 2019].
Context and Narrative 