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.