All's quiet on the western front but in the East
the pyre's still burning,
On streets of dust and rubble and blood
Where little hands are as likely found
In pockets
as on the pavement
in brutal bursts of red or rust.

Shells of buildings crumple into the skyline;
Gravestones lamenting the death of a nation,
Of a boy not yet old enough
to run,
Of a girl left at home
when the walls came down,
A parody of a crippled city still standing.

There is wailing;
Of sirens and prayer and grief,
As white helmets pull white cloth parcels from concrete tombs,
And another line is lost,
Lists of forgotten names becoming sand,
Trickling back to the earth in streams and storms at golden gates.

Watch this history of the future unfold,
Safely from a screen, safer still in that certainty,
There may be something yet
Left for the generations that come
After,
The victors' history in the victor's hand,
As eons of war are written away, the lives lost,
buried,
6 ft deep.