Forgotten, Forgotten, Forgotten

The air is dark with approaching death

And I hear it in the silence

Of forgetting and forgetting and forgetting

Wars, past and present.

Televisions and movie theatres

Add to the dull hum of silence

The sound we all make as we ignore

That which we thought we left behind.

It was not left to burn in fallen Troy

We did not leave it at Thermopylae

At Jerusalem’s gates

Or Rome’s hills.

We did not leave it in the dust of Carthage

At the yurt flaps of Khan

Or the bottom of The Channel

Gorged with the husks of ships

And the fragments of men.

We did not leave it on Abraham’s plains

The bloodthirsty dirt of Gettysburg

Or the long road back from Moscow.

We did not leave it at the door of the Bastille

The fields of Somme and Passchendaele

The skies over Britain

Or the waves in the harbor of pearls.

We did not leave it at Berlin’s feet

Or in the husks of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

It does not wander alone in Korea’s no man’s land

It does not lie dormant in the jungles of Vietnam

Or the killing fields of Cambodia

It is not broken as Yugoslavia

It has not sounded its death knell in Rwanda

It does not lie dead in the deserts of Iraq

Or exposed on the hills of Afghanistan

It is not gasping for breath in Sudan

Or falling into a coma in Somalia

It lives and breathes forgotten

Like a crawling parasite

Behind the eyes

Burdening the mind of humanity

We forget and forget and forget

That war is not left on the battlefield

War remains with us

And in us

War is in our souls