International Day of the African Child

Today, June 16th 2007, is the International Day of the African Child. "....... On 16 June every year the international community celebrates the UN-Day of the African Child. The celebrations are to honour the lives of children who, in 1976, marched in the streets of Soweto (Southern Africa) to protest the inferior quality of their education. UNICEF uses this day to promote the education, identity, welfare, status and other civil rights for children and their families in Africa........."

(photo source : Reuter )

I dedicate this poem to the souls of all children who suffered from inhumanities :

I am

I am - yet what I am, none cares or knows:
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:
I am the self-consumer of my woes --
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shadows in love's frenzied stifled throes
And yet I am, and live-like vapours tost

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteem:
Even the dearest that I love the best
Are strange-nay, rather, stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man hath never trod
A place where woman never smiled or wept
there to abide with my creator God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie
The grass below, above, the vaulted sky.

- John Clare -