What price this child

Picture if you will a photo

A photo of a town

A damaged, war torn town

Unrecognisable from any other

This town could be any one of thousands

And probably is

Picture in the centre, filling much of the frame

A building, a house

Broken, falling down

Its original design lost in the aftermath

Of a bomb, or bombs

Dropped by an enemy

The inhabitants had never met

Now picture in the foreground

Poking from out the rubble

A small hand, a forearm

Broken

The colour of the skin indeterminate

Obscured by blood and dust staining its surface

The face of the child unrecognisable

Beneath the debris

This child could be any child

Of any age

Of any gender

Of any race

But one child among millions

Picture all this, if you will

And then call this picture ‘price tag’

For this we are told is the price of freedom

This the price of peace

The death of children

Ours, theirs

Yours

But what price the life of this child

What price this child

And who decides this price of peace

A country whose own children fight

In an army that will kill more of them itself

Through miscalculation

Equipment failure

And human error

Than the enemy will ever see

And their names, too, will become numbers

Tabulation of acceptable loss

But one more price

In the fight for that we cannot win

Through war

But what price the life of this child

And do they think us so unwilling to pay it

That we would not forgo a meal to see once more his smile

That we would not risk the insecurity

Of reducing a military

That cannot protect us

To see her play again

Of limiting a deterrent that does not deter

To hear them all laugh again

But murder is nothing new

War is nothing new

It is a part of us

And has been for as long as our races can remember

And longer

Since man first learned that by bending his knuckles

Curling the tips of his fingers into his palm

He could turn the end of his arm into a club

And no country is without its evils

Its injustice

Its closet full of skeletons

For all colonisation is genocide

All succession, each claim to territorial rights

Is bloodshed

And all conflict gives death to those

Who did not chose the fight

But all I can ask is

What price the life of this child

This life

This potentiality unrealised

Never to run again

Play again

Never to grow

And laugh

And know love

This life extinguished

For reasons not adequately explained

Justified

Or any fault of this young corpse

Lying among the rubble

Its home has now become