“Cream of the Crop”
People are homogenized,
Spun around an axis,
Skimmed, acidified, separated,
Turned non-soluble liquid,
Reduced in size, and
Distributed by grade.
The cream rises to the top.
They are the buttermilk,
Dense,
Attributing their success to hard work,
Smart choices, and
Focus.
Focus.
They call the skim milk
Lazy and worthless,
And even worse
Deservent.
The visual turnkey of this poem is vivid, alive and well thought. The synonyms connect the body of the image to the line being drawn between stanzas. When the "cream rises to the top"...the poem takes a breath, and then two...and then draws you to look at what is left. This poem has movement and subtle sound and fascinates me every time I read it. The last line always brings a big smile out of me..."deservent"...I pause wondering at the spelling and meaning behind the flip and then my mind goes to the play on the recent "divergent" series by Veronica Roth- those born to neither the cream or the skim milk...those that transcend both. What exactly are we all deservent of?
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DeleteI love and hate the connection with the Divergent series. Haha. I never read that nor saw the movies, so my biases dislike that association. But i love how writing takes on more than a writer can imagine or want. The two classes in the divergent series sounds really interesting.
The US education system inspired me for the poem. I see the system as separating people into social groups by their tests scores and socio economic status. The proportions of whole milk to skim milk probably doesn't match the metaphor as far as graduation rates or dropout rates suggests as measuring success. But still, i saw schools separating students so the cream rose to the top, and the rest enter their proper strata of the working classes. Of course, then the people on top contribute their successes to themselves and what they did. It's the American Nightmare! If you don't make it, it's becuase you failed, probably due to laziness or stulidity of your own. That makes the failed skim milk deservant. Skim milk deserves to be at the bottom because it couldn't rise up.
Is the first line necessary? I guess the reader can figure that part out
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