Dave said it today…
Pictures of starving children
our cupboards full of non-essential luxuries.
So what can such as we do
to stem this world’s insanities?
Each week more money and energy flow thru our hands
than many people in the third world see in a lifetime.
This moment…THIS moment, someone starves
some child cries out in that utter well of despair
that only the young and innocent of this world have to bear.
That endless moment of terror
that waits without cause or remorse
to prey on their young lives
crushing their attempts to understand and be loved
staining their innocence and corrupting their trust.
Generations turning like wheels, children issuing forth
into war and poverty, sickness and pain
and sometimes, …sometimes into love.
More than our imaginations could hold or our hearts believe
they live in far away places where people
are different and, somehow, less real.
Our perceptions of these places lost between
the stock market quotations and furniture sales.
My Chris is four and when he hugs me and says, “I love you.”
the love and cherishing wash thru me so poignantly
He knows he’s loved and safe and secure
and his love and innocence can burn in their full flowering.
He lives in this world we’ve made him
between his naps and meals and tickling
and being told he’s a good boy.
He grows strong and whole, here.
Can he really be living in a world where people are gambled
for money and power?
gallagher
19 December 1983
— Copyright 1965-2008 by Dennis Gallagher —