Mentor Poet Post #8: Hunger - Cynthia Manick
"Hunger" by Cynthia Manick is about the desire to eat as much as possible. Hunger is a serious problem in the world and this poem makes the idea feel real to the audience.
Manick reflects on the hunger she faced as a child:
as a child i would swallow
pits and plums wanting to grow
Right off the bat, we can see that she's breaking rules for the English language. She leaves out apostrophes and doesn't capitalize the "I" or the beginning of each sentence. This could be used to depict innocence as a child or even give an idea if how people think when they are hungry. It's normally harder to think coherently when your stomach needs.
In the first third of the poem, Manick considers her childhood. She wants to grow a garden inside of herself which is bizarre. From this, I remembered watching cartoons where children were too afraid to eat watermelon seeds because they figured that watermelon seeds would grow inside them. Instead of being afraid, Manick wants to grow a garden. That’s slightly unsettling and could show how desperate Manick is. Growing a garden inside also reminded me if the poem, "Krishna Denies Eating Mud." That's where Krishna, a Hindu god, makes his mother forget that he is a god to keep his identity a secret. His mother finds out about his identity because he was eating rocks, fingernails, and mud. While those are things that babies aren't able to eat, it's still a little interesting that both poems incorporate eating certain things. Manick then states that she wants to eat the rough skin of fruits to keep her flesh strong. People normally don't eat the skin of most fruits, so this shows how desperate and bony Manick was as a child.
In the next chunk, Manick shifts the focus of hunger to other people and compares herself to a whale species. She wants to be able to feed a whole block and fit lots of food inside her. This may sound like gluttony, but when taking her other poems about slavery and rights into account, I think that she is actually desperate for food.
formed muscadine grapes. they’d hang
from my mouth like tonsils.
Rather than growing a garden inside her, she wants to grow a garden everywhere to provide food. Her imagination is going wild as she pictures herself spitting out grapes to plant in the soil. Her mouth is rich of food; so much that she wouldn’t be able to ask for more.
Lastly, Cynthia Manick brings the focus back to herself:
to be real careful not to break the skin
when i breathe though, real careful.
She’s oddly cautious of how she eats her food and that could mean that she doesn’t want to be wasteful. It’s safe to say that when she was young, there wasn’t much food available.
The image I chose for this poem is a whale shark that has an enormous mouth that can work as a vacuum. They always appear to be hungry and I think this type of whale would resemble Cynthia Manick the best as a child.
