The world is dressed in bright, shrovtide festival colors
with olive branches braided into hair, bells chiming in market squares,
children are promised futures bright as freshly coined gold
history is told as a gentle guide,
from fire to wheel to satellite,
cave wall, cathedral, glass skyscraper
the species congratulates itself on its ascent
from flint to forge to fiber-optic miracle
the sack of cities, smolder of ancient capitals,
are embalmed as distant myths,
their calamities, declawed by time and pedagogy.
hope is rehearsed as doctrine,
and optimism, almost ceremoniously so, proclaims
that some things never change.

and as parchment yellows, the bells sound dull compared to alarms.
empires rehearse their familiar lines
legions become regiments, regiments become coalitions,
crosses trade places with flags, flags with logos.
ships that once hauled spices and silk
are remembered alongside those that carried bodies in chains
the trenches of Flanders acquire descendants
in deserts and cities reduced to coordinates.
and time, surely proud, aware of its own redundancy
knows that some things never change.

one almost admires the symmetry of the atrocity,
the meticulous continuity of human cruelty,
the camps are rebranded, the borders redrawn,
from the long march to the killing fields,
ghettos fenced in stone to those fenced in by policy.
each century swears it has learned,
and each century leaves footnotes written in blood.
and you must laugh, because the pattern is so precise
some things never change, do they?

at last, the rhetoric collapses under its own weight.
and archives groan, stacked with testimonies no one finished reading,
as one’s life might pass before they possibly could
the names of the dead multiply faster than apologies
and war learns new languages but speaks the same sentence,
continues its catechism with modern instruments.
trafficked bodies remain commodities
still priced, moved, erased,
and genocide, always sworn to be “never again,”
keeps finding new calendars to inhabit.
and the future inherits the past without amendment.
an observer stands removed, emptied,
staring at the immaculate repetition of disaster,
and the refrain collapses into mourning:
why must some things never change?