All About Being Copyright Protected Poem by Gayathri Seetharam

All about being copyright protected
-Gayathri B. Seetharam
A wise man once told me
That his grandmother always said
If a girl gave chocolate to a boy
She wanted him to help her with her homework;

A wise engineer said that
There are women like me
Who hold themselves on a tight leash
For I am translating, society dictates
A certain kind of behaviour;

Yesterday morning, my 20 year old son and I were discussing cultural differences
And I said that Canada in its unique way,
Along with its multi-culturalist constitutional clause
Was almost like a communist society
In its lack of strict adherence to a celebration of the classes;

My son found this reassuring
For he was born in Canada and has been brought up here
And he feels a kindred spirit with
The spirituality behind the happiness of such a statement;

Canada is an egalitarian society
Which communist Russia was not
And based on the meanings in The Oxford Dictionary
Canada treats all its people equally and gives equal opportunities in deserving cases
The essential difference being that communist culture
Asked of people what it gave them
Or this is Soviet propaganda
And people only worked in synch with their ability;

This brings me to what Geena, my intelligent and pretty graduate school friend
Had said about life in communist Romania
Apparently, the Romanians had a saying
Which I have tweaked a little to fit into the context of the poem
In egalitarian and democratic societies, people work like dogs and live like kings
In communist societies, people worked like kings but lived like dogs.