A person carries the dead if they loved them.
I carry mine every day.
Surrounded by ghosts of former teachers and friends.

The greatest generation, the silent ones, who knew the taste of dirt.
I replay their calm voices, their big laughs, their gaze.
Passing the blueprints across the wooden table.

I find myself unable, to participate in the general decree,
though everyone around me performs with astonishing discipline.
They handed us a torch, heavy and burning.

My generation set it down in the grass.
Belgian summer dies into autumn.
A great dependable forgetting begins.

Heat waves came and took the old and weak,
the land and crops dried.
People wipe their brows and count their coins.

Pretend the sun won’t rise again, hot enough to crack the bricks next July.
Start again where we were last year.
The summer concludes.

Categorized as a closed file.
As if the suffocating air had merely been administrative error.
This quiet ancient sea, a graveyard.

Bursting floods and warm winds, an anomaly.
Absolve the need to alter habits.
An anomaly happens once.

It is just the way of the world now.
Agonizing arrangement is not destruction itself,
knowledge to halt is directly in front of us.

Fully assembled, while no one moves a finger.

   – J.S.