"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

157
continuation of a species. The poem shows that cultural systems are not always strong
enough to replace the biological or instinctual functions necessary to sustain life.
Livingstone first uses death as a connecting link between the starfish and the
malnourished children who suffer from “kwashiorkor” (line 15). Unlike the dead starfish
human corpses are not beautiful “artefacts” or relics of ancient workmanship. But the
comparison is macabrely extended to describe the effects of kwashiorkor, where the
extended stomachs of the malnourished children give a sixth point to their bodies (along
with the head, arms and legs) and so give them the shape of a six-pointed “David’s star”
(line 22). Earlier in the poem the starfish is compared to Solomon’s seal (line 11), a
synonym for the Star of David (line 22) (Brewer 1018), and so becomes a symbol for the
ancient religion of Judaism.
In stanza five Livingstone describes the still living children in their too-large castoff
clothes and their “blanched faces” (line 26). Earlier he refers to their “dried-out little
visages” (lines 18-19). Both descriptions poignantly emphasise their suffering for it is
their expressions which are:
... exacting
shrift for inviolable
childhood forced to war with
intimations of dread.
(lines 27-30)
The “shrift” or penance and need for absolution are exacted or demanded of humankind
who has abandoned its children. The word shrift, like the Star of David, has obvious
religious connotations. The Holocaust and its atrocities are evoked through Livingstone's
choice of the Judaic element and the suffering children, while the African word
“kwashiorkor” globalises the abuse of the world’s children. The poet intimates that
children should be shielded from the terror of abandonment, that childhood should be
“inviolable” and not filled with “intimations of dread”.
The poem thus moves out of the realm of biology into that of faith. This links
with the idea of conscience as a way of righting humankind’s imperfections, specifically
the abandonment of children. This helps to make sense of the concluding lines where the
starfish is a metaphor for the abandoned children who are lost to history and are devoured
by death and time, figured as the “maws / of sand”.