There Always Must Be Children

To disenchant and disintoxicate
Are tasks best left to those who started late.
The young still love one another and die.

The old whose young loves grew famous rewrite.
Only those whose young loves turned ash can say
Their young were never wrong. Love just escapes.

Meanwhile, on a bridge under mortar fire
During what was said to be a ceasefire,
A family of brother, mother, daughter,

And father sprawls. More refugees slaughtered.
The unmentionable odor of death,
The actual rasps of their final breaths

Will not come across in the photographs.
But as soldiers crouch in the lower half
With these dead, an outsized soldier’s statue

Kneels at upper left, flag raised in tribute
To the last war, when today’s combatants’
Grandparents fought for the same resistance.