Lest We Forget

It was as if time herself
were a dry fountain, where the urn fills only
with pale ashes; where broken tablets
of illegible laws cobble the ground;
where church and court alike are built of bones,
a filigreed white lattice-work of chalk
through which the white sun casts
a black lattice of shadows, widows' weeds;
where a small wind picks through debris,
an indigent in search of scraps; where,
in the desert of our god-drenched origins
the armies grow again, human beetles in
their masks, vague hatred with its poison
gas, the air itself a deadly trench
to these benighted boys, condemned
to fall again into the ranks
of what repeats...

from Operations: Desert Shield, Desert Storm by Eleanor Wilner