Confident Anticipation of Joy (Health Care)

An Iraqi child standing in her parents’ blood  (The NY Times) Photo by Chris Hondros

Confident Anticipation of Joy
©2014 by Alice Walker

How peculiar it feels

to speak about

 health care in America

taking care of people’s

health

while our government

bombs

 the limbs

off children

in far away lands.
And starves and imprisons
not a few of them
at home. 

How odd

that it seems

not obviously known

 that true health care

must mean, at minimum,

 deliberate non- harming

of anyone?

How strange is haggling

over how much this or that

medical

“procedure”

is going to cost;

meaning strictly

where our own bodies

and they are precious

are concerned.

While  over there

military

“procedures”

our country exports
may 

slice  a grandfather

in half while his

grandchildren
who have crowded
around him
in 

confident anticipation
of joy 

become clots of blood

 and matted hair

on the walls.

What’s left of the walls.

Weird how we talk

and haggle

as if we are the only

people in the Universe

needing

care of our health.

Health care:
 care of Life
itself. 

what the maimed

and  slaughtered

in many lands

have died,

hopelessly

crying for.