WHY DO CHILDREN OF THE POOR

WHY DO CHILDREN OF THE POOR

Why do children of the poor die so readily?

By the age of five

they’re already disarmed for life.

Is money a gene they’re missing?

Or is their suffering

just a diminished immunity to the rest of us?

The gluttons of knowledge

discuss James Joyce in a loud voice

in well-lit universities.

With great nuance and finesse

they enumerate the seven kinds of ambiguity

and the mean diameter of the vowel O

in the context of neo-Chicago Aristotelianism

in the latter plays of Shakespeare

where the commas fall like worms

out of every page of his art

as if he couldn’t punctuate

the death-rage in his heart

with the subtler points

of the neo-critical literati.

I think Shakespeare would have seen

the sterling irony

of debating proto-Nostratic linguistics

while living children all around him

can’t read their names in their own mother-tongue.

If the same word for oak

was the word we used for door

when we all learned to speak the same language

milennia ago

it’s not hard to imagine

given modern advances in communication

that the word for child

that we used way back then

is the root of the word we use for atrocity today.

Why do the children of the poor die so readily?

Nature or nurture?

Is it because the children of the rich

are taught that wealth is longevity

and the children of the poor

who can’t read the fine print

bleed to death like expired medical plans?

Why do the rich think that the poor

are the reason their children suffer

and the best thing to do is make orphans of them

by sending the poor of one nation

to war against another

to keep the economy growing

and cut back on the unemployed

like deer culled from a budget in hunting season?

If you’re a child born from this womb

and you grow up fat and cuddly

you’ve still got

a back-up heart transplant in the bank

but if you’re a child born from this one

to thrive on nothing

you look for lifeboats

and see nothing but rocks.

You reach out to the watching world

like a camera

with big questions

in your unaccusing eyes

about what is happening to you

in the arms of your helpless mother

and the world looks back at your tiny corpse

swollen with hunger

like the uninhabitable planet

of your empty stomach

as if it were all just part of your bad luck

that you were born at the mercy of flies

clustering like first world pharmaceuticals

on the black market

of your third world eyelids.

Why are the children of the rich

born into health and favour

and the children of the poor

are slaves to sex and labour?

Have you ever thought about

how many children had to die

to make your running shoes?

Like all those who died

giving birth to the blues

so you could put your suffering

to their music

like the lyrics of the squeamish rich

to the heart-sick voices of the poor?

Why do the children of the poor

die so readily in bad neighbourhoods

where the streets are named for strangers

who all live somewhere else like slumlords?

Insane waste of light and love.

Desecration of heart and mind

Of genius and compassion.

Of cures for cancer

and violins that can play

like willows by a river in the wind.

There’s nothing unfinished about a child

as if the green apple

were any less than a ripe one.

Growing up among the living means

that at every moment of your life

you’ve reached your full potential

and you realize that nothing’s ever missing.

Everything is whole and beyond perfect just as it is.

That’s innocence from the inside out.

And then someone steps in

and teaches the child

how much it must suffer like the rest of us

just to be itself.

That’s the beginning of a rich man’s religion

from the outside in.

This child’s afraid of losing face

and this child’s not allowed to have one.

Why do the children of the poor die so readily?

Why do some children go to summer camp

the way others go to prison

to earn their tats like scout badges?

Why are the children of the poor

turned into baby rattlesnakes

like seven year olds with AK-47s

that are as poisonous as the adult ones?

Why do the children of the poor go to war

while the children of the rich go to college?

There’s nothing in the world

a poor child can take for granted.

Life is a wound

that deadens the mind in time

if you’re alive enough to endure it.

There are young girls in Afghanistan

who are risking their lives every day

just to learn to read.

Omar Khayyam says

The moving finger writes

and having writ moves on

nor all thy piety nor wit

can lure it back to cancel half a line

nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.

So the Taliban are resorting

to splashing acid in the eyes

of their sisters and daughters

to see if that works better than water.

And the National Rifle Association

inside the classroom

and outside the hospital

is defending the right

by force of the second amendment

as it’s written in the Constitution

for every child to pack a lunch

the way their teachers pack guns to school

in pursuit of American happiness

and higher learning

with a competitive edge.

Why do the lean children of the poor die so readily

like one of the seven plagues of Egypt

in back alleys and abandoned buildings

with needles stuck in their arms

while the obese children of the rich

are having the fat of the land removed surgically?

Why do the rich spend twenty million dollars

on a painting of a child

with impressionist skin by Renoir

while a real child lies torn at their feet

in a surrealistic abattoir

signed in its own blood

like the masterpiece of an unknown genius?

Why is so much squandered on the rarity of things

than on their commonality

like children and green oxygen?

Why are movie-stars and football players

paid more on a yearly basis

to live out our fantasies of sex and violence

than it would take

to keep all the children in the Sudan

healthy and alive for a year?

Is it better in this world

to be born a corrupt politician

with a command of words like maggots

than it is to be born innocent

and have nothing to say for yourself

because you’re too young

to speak for anyone else

even when you’re murdered?

Why do the children of the poor die so readily?

How does it come about

that the United States Supreme Court

accords an oil corporation

all the rights and privileges

of a genuine bigger-than-life individual

backed up by a birth certificate

from a lapwing government

though it’s a succubus among humans

and twenty-five million children a year

die anonymously in misery

right at the peak of their suffering

like the fame of the nameless logos

on a generic death

where one size fits all?

Why do the children of the poor die so readily?

Is it because the poor are waiting for lung transplants

that have been inflated into footballs

to score political points

for a ghoul in a governor’s office

to balance the budget like death

in favour of the rich

who are waiting for yachts?

Is it because the road we were on

just suddenly got up one day

like human evolution

and walked away from us in disgust

to go look for the lost children

we left like the wings on our heels in the dust?

Is it because as Basho says in a haiku

for those who say

they have no time for children

there are no flowers

and we’re so blind to the peach blossoms

we can’t see the depth of the curse in this

that we give so little mind

to what we have uprooted from the garden

as if the children of agrarian Adam

scratching for a living in the dirt

weren’t as legitimate as those

that were sired

by an industrial

Johnny Appleseed?

Is it because the children of the poor

are born first

to be thrown into the mouths

of corporate Moloch and Wall Street Baal

like a blood sacrifice to a cosmic monstrosity

just so Carthage doesn’t fall again

to the venture capital

of down-to-earth Romans

like the price of salt on a sterile market

or the soil of the Love Canal?

Is it because the children of the poor

are the expression of a death-wish

to raise our own assassins

as the only way of finding forgiveness

for what we did to them

before during and after they were born?

Why do the children of the poor die so readily?

Is it because we think of the children of the profligate poor

as the repeating decimals

of a future that goes on forever incommensurately

like one generation after another

or a clepshydra of blood

or a tiny thread of a mindstream

trickling down from the top of the world mountain

like a loose thread of life

that we think we can sever their lives anywhere

or pull down the pillars of pi

by cutting their legs out from under them

like the fundamentals of life

without drawing the knife across our own jugular

like the intestate balls of a castrated ram

or the throat of a wedding bell without a womb?

Why do the children of the poor die so readily?

Is it because . . .

PATRICK WHITE