Is There No End to This?

INTRO:

Time passes. Conditions remain. This poem follows poverty as it reproduces itself across decades. What is left is not certainty, but the quiet question of whether the tunnel even ends.

By Vincent R. Pozon

In the tunnel of decades, the hope
of light at the end bends out of sight

When children pop out of the legs
of the poor, they grow up knowing no sun or ease

So they squint to see in the dark,
trying to learn the shape of the walls

What is left is chance: in this unlit life,
a politician will bed their daughter

their mothers will find jobs wiping
the bottoms of white old women

Can we dream that the decades of winding
have merely hidden the glimmer of an end?