The moving shadow-terminator of living memory
leaves another era in the dark of history
when no living witnesses remain.
in the creeping twilight, as the voices begin to fall silent,
the myth-makers take up their song.
Snatch, from the hands of those who lived through it,
the experience of apocalypse:
the Western Front, No Man's Land,
the Dust Bowl, the judgment day of economics,
the barbed wire and the death camps beyond.
Take it up and pretty it, take it up into fairytale, hum
Never Again, We Swear It On the Bones of the Dead
as if it were the chorus to this season's happy love song
under the breath, in a language they don't speak.