These Also Are My Children
These also are my children.
They are yours as well,
the ones less favored by the lords of finance,
those of little interest in the citadels of culture
who go unnoticed since they have no special claim,
the girls and boys not situated where hidden paths converge
to fame and fortune in the lottery of life.
I would have you act with kindness to them
not because there’s money somehow to be made
or to curry favor with a God whom none of us can know
whether He or She is there at all
or cares a whit about the ones we cavalierly cast aside,
but because it is the right thing to do for ourselves,
to exploit the full extent of what it means to be a man,
and because these children truly are all we really have.
It feels as if America gets smaller every day,
less able or inclined towards compassion or concern,
too willing to let go of all things held in common,
distrustful there are any who have a case to make.
As doctors hurry patients, as scammers fleece at will,
as the rich require more from the many who are poor,
the time we have for poetry and marching in parades
or even speaking face-to-face to colleagues and to friends
is more diminished and constrained,
held hostage to uncertainty,
for we must make each moment count
to assuage our insecurity.
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We no longer can afford the little costs of life,
the time it takes to laugh at one’s own absurdities,
the pennies we don’t bother even to produce
which used to pay to help a weary traveler on his way
or buy an ice-cream for a child whose parent could not pay.
Penny-wise, pound-foolish, a better people knew,
will eventually impoverish nearly all of us,
if not in our pockets than in spirit and in joy,
as the wagons rush to circle empty camps.
You can’t quite see it in their eyes
as easily as you surmise
the way you could when hungry kids,
on trips across the rural South
or in turn-of-century tenements
or during the Depression, one hundred years ago,
stared at you
with all the little energy that still remained to them.
But it is there, the hopelessness,
the sense that time has passed them by,
that malls and fancy birthday parties,
memories and dreams alike,
were not meant for such as them,
the ones too much encumbered by the real facts of life,
the children who are hungry still after they’ve been fed.
One day America will speak of her Great Shame
as we now do of the millions long enslaved,
heads bare as though in expiation of the sin
yet more discomfited than shaken or resolved,
still holding up the Bible to justify such crimes
while filling our coffers with their pain.
