Suffer The Children

Too young for words, the child's face,
within its craggy, over-sized skull, seated
on its scrawny neck emits a constant,
pained whine of dire needs unmet,
his pinched, dark features etched in a
rictus of pain. His mother, herself in a
state of starvation, can do nothing for her
severely malnourished infant. Her other
children, older, just as miserably
malnourished, are silent, their eyes
long since reverted from pleading to
deeply blank, expectations fled in the face
of their grim reality. They do her bidding,
lift one tired, swollen, bleeding foot after
the other in their desperately slow flight
from war zones, from the arid, persistent
drought, from their sickly cow's and goat's
fallen, bone-protruding carcasses.

The children's dull, dark skin, covered
with sores and the dust of their long journey
stretches over their swollen, starved bellies;
absent the merest padding of flesh on their
fragile limbs. Flies buzz about their hollow,
suppurating eyes, the children too languidly
disinterested to lift emaciated arms
to dispel the disease carriers.

Save The Children, Oxfam, UNICEF,
and Doctors Without Borders issue
daily condition updates on the plight
of these food-migrants, bemoaning a world
indifferent to their plight, sadly moved
but become immune to the recurring
misery, leaving the indigent so marginalized,
vulnerable to calamitous extermination;
a levelling of the world's population, of
those incapable of helping themselves,
succumbing to the Three Horsemen of
the Apocalypse: War, Famine and Death.