FOUND FOOTAGE

I recall
the footage
am

still haunted by it
those days it was so fresh
(I was born
just less than eight years
after the war’s end)

thought
      for a long time
there a level of darkness,
depravity, racist inhumanity
the likes of which
we would
      never
             see again

terrible to say so, but our species
is nothing if not
a creature
of irony

delighting in proving
(here so glaringly) everyone
horribly wrong

one monstrous darkness disappears
another

is creating itself

a darkness whose reversals

were they
not so cruelly logical
would

be impossible to understand

at last, I think,
I am beginning to understand

Published by Damian Garside