I want to find that other world,
the one where Mozart lived past thirty-six,
and Beethoven didn't lose his hearing,
where Schubert finished the Unfinished
and sang more than six hundred songs,
where Chopin rippled and rang for ninety years,
and Brahms fell in love and out of sorrow,
and Gilbert and Sullivan didn't quarrel
about the color of a carpet at the Doyle.

I want to find that other world,
where Ann Frank wrote her fifty books,
and JFK waved at crowds another term;
where the Arabs in 1948 accepted
their Jewish cousins as neighbors,
where Hitler at twenty-two got a decent job
after his German Army service,
and Lenin never read Karl Marx's "Kapital"!

I want to find that other world,
where giant pandas are free to roam
in mountainside giant bamboo forests;
Brazilian tropical forests sprout fire-free,
and wild elephants with heavy ivory
live to see their grandchildren amusing all the herd.

I want to find that other world
where sports are games and skills again,
not bloody, costly contests of competition,
and high school art is not declared immortal;
where all the Muses serve their original purpose:
to ennoble humankind in dialog with their gods.

I want to find that other world
where we grow up color-blind, seeing only
what needs to be done to help each other,
not the ancestry of those who do it;
where unprincipled action is publicly condemned;
where jipping people of their savings is unheard of.

I want to find that other world
to see what it could be if humankind
returned to its original search for God,
discovering the roads of love and caring,
to read the stories of bravery and daring
that made that other world come true.

I want to find that other world
where the horrors of my lifetime
never happened, and humans did their best
to help the world's precious creations survive;
where guns are merely for defense, never attack,
and are never known by children, and
no one hits another, calls him names, or steals his bread.

But if I can't find that other world,
and must remain to my life's end in this one,
I'll keep the thoughts of that other world in mind
to recognize its pieces, its surprises, here,
and nourish them and love them so they can grow
from our own history's sad ashes.

Ursula T. Gibson, 3-19-94

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