Another Project?

I do seem to keep on starting poetry projects and then not really keeping up with them, don't I?
Well here's another.
A couple of Christmases ago a friend gave me a poetry book called "Best Loved Poems". Inside the poems (all very well known and famous) are divided into sections. My latest project is to write a poem that would fit into each of the sections. The sections are

Childhood and Youth
Love and Marriage
Life
Loss and Comfort
War and Peace
Read Aloud
Read Quietly
Animals and Nature
Magic And Mystery


These projects of mine are of course just a way of gettingmyself started on writing when I can't think of much to write.
This is the one that I have written for "Childhood and Youth".

Other Childhoods

Black oil, thicker than blood;
thicker than treacle; thick as paste;
forcing its way through the crack in the pipe;
gathering in globules, in shiny tumescences
around the ragged edge of the metal.
Viscosity battling gravity,
overcoming it for a time,
but finally - with a sucking, slurping sigh -
quitting the struggle; dropping into the spreading pool;
spreading into the dust;
toxic ink on a sandy blotter.

And there, dirt-clad and dusty grey,
a naked child drew patterns in the foulness
with tiny questing fingers.
Oblivious to the stench, oblivious to the danger,
oblivious to the poison, he wiped it into his skin,
into his hands, his arms, his face.

And no one stopped him;
not his mother, sitting yards away
on the mud step of a mud house,
washing vegetables in ditch-dirty water;
not his brothers and sisters and playmates
absorbed in their own games,
their own worlds of childhood;
not the barefoot beggars, the silent supplicants
who passed him by unseeing and unheeding;
and not us, viewing from the cracked window
of the bus as we followed them down to the temple
and left him there.