If I Could

If I could wipe away from the world all the pain and suffering

If I could take away the spasms, the gasps; the fear of the ‘Dying’!

If I could rescue the animals from the raging forest fire when trapped,

And the brutalized, traumatized, ensnared child when kidnapped!

When from the lone cornered deer, the wild dogs tear the flesh raw,

If I could find other ways to appease the hunger of the carnivore!

So there wouldn’t be killing for food, no anguished cry in pain,

There wouldn’t be the frantic, pathetic effort to survive in vain.

If there were no blindness, no deafness, no Leprosy or cancer,

If starving children did not have to die en-masse of hunger,

A world without deplorable diseases, injustice, fiendish cruelty,

Would be a world after my heart, a utopian world, set in poetry!