No One Then Dreamed of Four Years’ War

The past in the head
Is lens in a lens—
This nook of the dark
Spooks us seen from that
Thought that we just had.

We don’t look back from now
But from near to far,
Far then back to near,
And we squint mind’s eye.
This then, oh, that then,

If that then back then
Had known the next then
We now know! The war,
The drought years to come
Since the floods, the loss

Of the world we knew,
All this that we know,
The chess set that we move
In our cramped skulls, look
At the depth, the lens

In the lens in lens,
The past that sees the past
And thinks, how could we
Not have known how much
We could not have known?