how do you define a lucky kid?

In the snow
the children
are making a dolls' hospital.

Reminds me of a school
I taught in once
(for delicates,
originally, treatment for T.B.).
Bandstand type construction,
open on all sides.
On days like this
winds of pure ice whistled through
unchecked.

The children came to breakfast.
Asthmatics, mainly.
Some seemed to be on their last breaths.
You thought they would not last the day,
but after breakfast they were fine.
No thanks though, to the wind --
escape from home's 
emotional uncertainties, more like.

Back to what the children do.
Rows of lumpy animals --
some of species indeterminate --
and fragile plastic dolls,
most with missing toes and fingers
or wide cracks here and there.

They lie in snow -- the lucky ones
have bandstand structures 
made of straws
to shelter them -- 
on thrown-together beds.
A wooden nurse looks over them.

Their parents huddle in a corner.
They cry for them, have flowers 
and grapes for them -- real grapes,
but paper flowers. A short way off,
a dolls' house where the parents live.

The flowers, I hear them say,
are for them to remember
those who've died.