Despite our best intentions, the huge scale of poverty in the world can easily overwhelm us, whereas one suffering child can reach into our hearts. And we want to help.
A moving interview on BBC Children In Need by Ed Sheeran during his trip to Liberia brought this home. If our lives were different, these could be our children trapped by poverty.
I wrote this poem having looked into the eyes of a malnourished child in a previous time of famine. The newspaper picture has long gone, but sadly, there are millions of children still suffering.
hunger stares at me,
pitiful eyes glazed
with trapped terror
devouring innocence
stripped of rights
naked needs exposed
to the world
children like mine
are dying to live
yet living to die
foetal heaps
of lost humanity
crawling on life’s edge
gazing into eternity
migrating herds
of human corpses
pawns of paradise
burn endlessly on
in the killing sun
while we plan
dream holidays
no vacations there
scratching in the dust
for forgotten aid
while fat flies suck
mortal juices
feast on crusted blood
lick the wounds of death
frozen in time,
heartaches and headlines
wrap fish and chips
money clinks
the world shrinks
famine for a feast
paper faces ooze tears
as oily fingers smear
dirt on victims
crushing fragile lives-
will anyone rescue
yesterday’s news
or leave poverty’s children
free to die in the dust?
Source: Cate Turton / Department for International Development’ – Creative Commons Licence