SATURN’S CHILDREN
For Elise Oliver
A nine year old girl somewhere far to the south
or south east of here, somewhere beneath
an African or an Asian sun,
is making bricks – packing clay into moulds,
all day, day after day. In her teens
she may bear children who luckily may live
long enough to also make bricks in the sun –
and may also officially exist.
She does not. Hers was one of tens of millions
of unregistered births, phantom boys and girls,
marked out for the very worst of wrongs
our ingenious species can commit.
We in the North and the West – with our
insatiate, unappeaseable consumption
of the earth itself – are not only
colonising the planet’s future,
but are devouring it.
Elise Oliver
April 26, 2024According to UNICEF, there are 166 million ‘invisible’ children, that is, globally and incredibly, 1 in 4 under 5’s, whose births have never been officially recorded. For the most part, they are excluded from education and health care and left vulnerable to exploitation and abuse. This poem encapsulates so succinctly the interminable cycle of inhumanity which they endure, brick by brick.
Jeff Teasdale
April 27, 2024We have a boundless capacity to not see causes and consequences…cheap clothes, cheap food, cheap holidays, cheap lives.
Focussing on one child like this, confronts us with it…and we can stop and think…or just shrug and move on. ‘Nothing-to-see-here”…