Did anyone ever know who we were if we
means more than a handful, flower
of a generation, young white men cut off
in the named commemorated wars?
I stare, Jewish, into that loss for which
all names become unspeakable.
Not ever, just the best and brightest but the most
wretched and bedeviled, the obscure, the strange,
the driven, the twins, the dwarfs, the geniuses, the gay.
But ours was not the only loss.
To whom does annihilation speak, as if for the first time?