For decades we, the young, who’d gained a precious dividend
got for us by imperfect elders at the cost of blood,
received their gift as if by right. We blithely understood
that now the blessings of enlightenment would never end.

In place of wasted centuries of famine, fire and sword
in which the greatest, at their pleasure, trampled on the least,
a higher understanding than the doctrine of the beast
had ushered in an age of reason and the trusted word.

We’re old; and beasts in masquerade as men decide our fate.
We blink, awakened from a pleasant dream, and realise this:
we lived our lucky lives within a brief parenthesis.
The normal rape of nations has resumed. We woke too late.