The war ended before the bullets stopped,
but no one sent the message.
Men kept falling like punctuation marks
on a sentence that should have ended a page ago.
Someone raised a flag,
but the wind refused to play along.
A statue was built before the bodies cooled,
bronze hands holding a peace that never arrived.
The speeches were written in past tense,
but the guns hadn’t heard them yet.
Mothers set tables for ghosts,
chairs pulled out for sons who forgot the way home.
Silence was ordered at the eleventh hour,
but silence isn’t empty—it carries the weight
of words unsaid, of names unwritten,
of a salute that never came.
So they signed the papers,
folded the flags,
and agreed to remember,
knowing full well they wouldn’t.
The war ended at half-past maybe.
Someone shook a hand, but it wasn’t attached to anyone.
The generals lined up for a photograph,
but the camera was a mirror,
and none of them showed up in the print.
A trumpet played the last post,
but the sound came out as a recipe for soup.
People cried anyway.
A wreath was placed at an unknown grave,
but the stone had an expiration date.
The name melted in the rain.
A voice declared, "Never again!"
but the echo misheard it as "Try again later."
And the silence that followed
was just marching in softer shoes.