A Conversation (that may never have happened)

once while walking here to there
i chanced to stop and rest awhile
upon a bench i’d never seen before

and as i sat many different kinds
of folk i watched pass by
till sat upon the bench near me
a man who said he’d crossed the pond
to see what life was really like
in our great land of canada
where’d he’d heard the streets were  paved
    with gold

i pitied him for traveling all this way
just to find our streets were like his own
then why he asked were we more rich
    than he
to which i turned my pockets inside out
and watched one lonely coin fall to the ground

who tells such stories he demanded
i said i did not know
but stories such as his abound
whenever the world is not at peace

his world he said was not at peace
but filled with bickering politicians
who called each other names like little kids
and promised things impossible to deliver
though still they were believed

i said i too in such a world did live
but since my world was called democracy
and his a soviet socialist state
my people protested louder
and so they thought they were
more free than he
though really the truth was only
a matter of degree

where will it end he agitatedly asked
concerned about his child
whose picture he extracted
from a pocket of his shirt
i looked upon the smiling face
of a girl so sweet and young
her eyes still flashed the innocence
that life would soon corrupt

i pondered then if i should lie
and say a better world would come
    one day
and this young girl could live
free from fear and undisturbed
by events beyond her ability to control

he looked at me
and saw within my eyes
the fear i had
his child and maybe mine
might someday each other face
across a war-torn battlefield
with rifles in their hands
and hatred in their hearts

he gripped my hand to show that if
this ever came to pass
he understood the cause would never be
such men as we

and we sat there holding hands
that bridged the gulf
at least for now
between two worlds so very far apart
and yet so near

and each in silence thought about
the things we both did dread:
and in my mind raged insurrection
and nuclear war
    too terrible to describe
while in his mind did conflagration
and widespread natural disaster
rid the world of millions
upon millions of its inhabitants

until were left the chosen few

then did we leave
and walk both east and west