They Laugh in My Language – Pat and Martha (Hardcover)

While language, culture and borders separate us from the rest of the world, there is a simple purity to the perception of the world through the eyes of a child no matter where they come from. In this book of short verse poetry, the authors pair dozens of poems about life through a child’s perspective with images of children at play, rest and in various emotional states from multiple countries and continents around the globe. Sharing this idealistic, optimistic view of a child allows the reader to see that the barriers that divide us as adults are largely constructed by our societies and that at a more direct level, we all have the same needs, wants and dreams for the future no matter where we come from .

The poems collected in this volume do such a good job of accurately capturing the way in which children view their lives and their future that it can’t help but warm the readers’s heart. When paired with children of all nationalities, sizes, colors and means, the message is even clearer and hits with greater impact. While it would be easy to peg this as a plea for humanitarianism or globalism, the authors are not direct in this, leaving it instead up to the reader’s sense of empathy and compassion to want to broaden their horizons beyond their circle of local influence to the entire planet. While children may enjoy hearing their thought process written on the page and seeing how their peers live in different parts of the world, this collection of poetry is just as powerful when read by an adult to remind them of a more direct way of seeing life.