How many children starving, did you say?
A million? Five million? It is sad,
Tragic really. But after all, they are
Thousands of miles away, remote as the Black Death
Or the dying stars. Oh, I do sympathise:
But I could never count much beyond ten –
Tragedy multiplied by millions fades
Into a faceless limbo of statistics
And leaves imagination cold on the outside.
Charity, I say, must begin at home.
Let charity begin at home.
Think of one child, your own or the next-door neighbour’s.
Tetter the pretty skin with sores, let the bones show through it
Like ribs of a stranded wreck. This is your child –
This derelict with the animal breath of famine
Whimpering through his frame. He understands nothing,
Nothing he knows but a mother long sucked dry
Of milk and tears, a father drained of hope.
You are that father, you are that mother.
Your child. Imagine. It is so hard to imagine?
Thousands of miles away, yet still they are next-door neighbours
Within the giant stride, the magic ring of compassion.
Let one child plead for all, as the Christ-child spoke for all
Innocents bundled away into a bloodless limbo.
This need not be so. Our target is mankind’s conscience:
Not by the wringing of hands shall our concern be measured
But in shelter, seed and ploughshares, that hope may be reborn.
Put one stranger’s child to the breast of your warm compassion.
Find its father a share in earth, his only birthright.
Sow a few handfuls of seed and give that child its future.
1 Written for Oxfam by the Poet Laureate to commemorate that organisation’s 25th birthday. Spoken by Dame Sybil Thorndike at the Royal Festival Hall.