All Sorts and other stuff

It is the day after the world went crazy for love (at least in the commercial sense!). Skuttunge is still cold with drifting snow in the air. The birch trees have a protective layer of ice like the food in the freezer when the door is (occasionally) left open.
This blog is posted daily, although I'm not writing a piece every day, but rather drawing from an archive developed since I restarted writing in 2005. My work offers a reflection of what I was doing over this period and a hint of the personal.Today's contribution tells its own story at the end.

Allsorts and Jelly Tots

Allsorts and Jelly Tots
Backed up by Endearments
A necessary sweet relief sugar shot
Certainly makes
Your conference experience hot

All sorts and Jelly Tots
Makes the content presented
Interesting not?
At Spier we congregated
To learn about
The chronic poor and not-so-poor
Spatially trapped
Socially unsure

Allsorts and Jelly Tots
Mixed in colour and in taste
How much money
Did talking about the poor waste
Or did the proceedings
Create the space
To learn and share
Bringing future change
If you dare

Allsorts and Jelly Tots
In tinier than bite-size pieces
Is it indicative of our collective approach
To always
The issues of the poor demote
Where people are trapped
Unable to move
Taking sustainability
From stops and starts
To development smooth

Allsorts and Jelly Tots
Sugar coated
By civil society, non-governmental players goaded
A term of endearment
Neatly plastic wrapped
All the romantic myths
Of Starvation
At risk to violence
By reality
Out of our
Dreamy existence snapped

By Simone Noemdoe, 29 March 2007 at a “Understanding and Addressing Spatial Poverty Workshop hosted by the Overseas Development Institute and Chronic Poverty Research Centre at Spier Wine Estate, Stellenbosch