NOT THIS WORLD
—Joseph Nolan
I can imagine a world in which unicorns exist
And dance across rainbows in the sky,
Where tiny fairies lure children
Away with them, into the woods
To dance around campfires
To the sounds of pipes and flutes until dawn,
But it is not this world.
I can imagine a world where one day
The Left split
And anarchists and communists
Began shooting at each other,
On purpose, for some reason,
Now obscure,
In the Spanish Civil War,
While fascist, Franco,
And the Nationalist forces
Laughed out loud,
And that world is this world.
I can imagine a world where
Trotsky, the leader of the Red Army
In the War of the Whites against the Reds,
Who proved clever enough
To bring the army he led
To victory
Would later be murdered
By an assassin,
Sent by his former comrade,
With an ice-pick in his head,
To die a slow and painful death,
And that world is this one.
I can imagine a world in which
Bolsheviks cannibalized each other
In vast purges
To overcome internal dissension in the Party,
Capitalist Roaders, Revisionists,
Reactionary Elements, Crypto-Monarchists,
And saboteurs,
And war against the Kulaks,
And starve the peasants into submission,
And force them into collective agriculture,
With over three million starved unto death,
And that world is this world.
I can imagine a world in which
God exists,
God, Who Is Love,
Who looks down on our tiny planet
And nurtures each and every living thing,
Where there has never been a war
A genocide or murder,
Or any other form of evil or cruelty,
But that world is not this world.
We live in the other world.
___________________
—Medusa, with thanks to Joseph Nolan for today’s fine poem!
