Cameron Penny's "If You Are Lucky in This Life" was orginally published in the November/December 2001 issue of North American Review. Marie Howe reads his poem in the film Voices in Wartime. The scene is from a Poets Against the War reading by prominent American poets that took place in February of 2003 at Lincoln Center in New York, on the eve of the Iraq War. At the time his poem appeared in Voices in Wartime, Cameron Penny was 9 years old. The poem appears at 5:50 from the beginning of the video.
If You Are Lucky in This Life
If you are lucky in this life
A window will appear on a battlefield between two armies.
And when the soldiers look into the window
They don’t see their enemies
They see themselves as children.
And they stop fighting
And go home and go to sleep.
When they wake up, the land is well again.