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1 Distraught anchor
the end of the world began
just after the nine o'clock news
well timed for the networks and syndicates
transmitting the judgement call
2 Appropriate touching
bosses embrace employees
outside the office
or aim gestural hugs at empty air
to include the missing
someone who looked in a mirror and burned
someone who typed at a keyboard and burned
someone who burned on the phone
someone stirring a cup of instant who burned
business will never be as usual again
but in all its intricate slippages
of honesty magnanimity
a daily secular sacrament
of the treasured world
so easily gone
3 The turn of the century
in those years polar explorers
wore thick knee-length sweaters
apparently knitted by their mothers
and mittens with the fur side inside
the aeroplane
had almost arrived and would look
like trolleys boys build out of boxes
and race on downhill roads
nearly everyone could read
and quote poetry
and clear handwriting
was the embodiment of clear thought
the enemies of humans then
were not other humans and their creeds
but poverty and fear and ignorance
much harder to oppose and win
4 Sherman's army reaches Kabul
he is the nightmare
the wrath of history
heating rails
to bend around trees
and telegraph poles
out of the centuries' past
an anger sanctioned
by long restraint
of civilisation
now set loose
the skirmishers
down from the hills
are dustbowl labourers
redundant express riders
laid-off lumberjacks
through the parched
goat-levelled villages
and huts of desolation
it will take everything
to stop them
5 Memorial
silence as the seats
in the grim hall
fill with the shades
of the known dead
and those presumed
but still missing
the nineteen on stage
ghosts themselves
have come to explain
with their mouths filled
with because and therefore
and silence remains
©2001, Tony Beyer
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