Global Hunger Poem by Bernedita Rosinha Pinto

Nations of starvation everywhere
as so many countries keep crying for food and medicines,
as mothers with their babies in hand keep sitting and staring,
waiting for food to feed their under-nourished children;

for years and years the world is watching
those little babies and children so deprived of food
as they are always so skinny with hunger and malnutrition
that they grow, some survive, some just die and go;

as in camps and tents, on streets and pavements mothers wait
for help and treatment for their infants and babies
no medicines nor hospitals to take care of their maladies
yet local doctors rush to extend cure and remedies;

but the same scene, the same sin, the same countries
keep confronting the same problem, the same difficulties
as years keep passing and countries keep developing
yet those nations that face starvation have had no solution;

so, how can families not open their own eyes,
how can they not think with their own minds
that if they have no providence of food,
how will their children grow up to be healthy and fit?

It is the father and mother of a child
who must stop making more and more babies
as they must ask themselves who will feed them
when food is so scarce and hunger is so extreme.

But all that those mothers and fathers ever want to do
is have no control over their feelings of lust;
and then they blame the drought, the famine for their plight,
while their children keep growing with protruding eyes and ribs;

is this humanity that men and their women produce children without thinking or provisioning for their children's nutrition?
How do parents not worry whether their children will survive
when deprivation of a normal diet is so existent?

Or are the instincts of these men and women more significant
that as babies get born and suckle at their mothers' breasts
and as they grow, they fall sick and sleep on the hospital beds,
while houseflies keep sitting on them as if they are trash;

even the rib-cage and the skeleton shape are so prominent
of the bodies of the children due to the constant hunger pangs
that their eyes pop out with expectation of survival
while their irresponsible mothers act helpless and coy;

how can such mothers ever forgive themselves
and watch their own children die in their own arms?
Or is this what a child's fate ought to be
that as they are born, they will be deprived of proper nutrition?

And as the world keeps pitying these nations
and sending them food, pulses, medicines to keep them alive,
their fathers and mothers keep making more hungry children
in the night without any guilt or responsible attitude;

so, can some organizations go there and educate those parents
to refrain or control themselves from indulgences and pleasures
rather than encourage food supply and medicines to those
men and women who produce children in the face of starvation?