IF THE DEAD CAME BACK

<a href="https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/01/26/national/crime-legal/japans-crying-politician-appears-court-pleads-not-guilty-fraud/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Source</a>

If the dead came back

What astonishing things they’d tell us,

How our yoked and heedless eyes might fill with tears,

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Our too-full hands drop down beside our sides…

But not one comes

To tender the silence with a mournful murmur.

We go out about our lives

And only on rare, exquisite moments stop,

Aghast, belittled, feminised, to wait, to watch

The streaming multitudes of ghosts beguiling time

Clambering to speak, their o-mouths working gasp-outs

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Of such mournful heraldries, and heresies,

Of pasts beguiling presents,

Of futures glanced by present pasts,

Of pasts which never rest:

Like bats, clinging and flapping to the blackened walls of empires,

Rotten at the core;

Or else, like crows, festering and darkening

The already darkened air,

They will not word their dire-filled messages

But stubbornly dead resist the probe and pressure.

O what tragedy’s already ready to make

The past repeat its always present,

Worrying our futures down beyond our present pasts.

If only the dead came back

What savage admonishings they’d give us!

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