Themes perhaps best forgotten

Anzac Day
Lay down your bugles
Murderous incompetence
​Merits no fanfares

Dulce at decorum
Est pro patria mori
​Shrill demented choirs

Shrill demented choirs
Recontextualise grief
​Drawing down of blinds

Move into the sun
See how it wakes the seeds, woke
Clays of a cold star

Clays of a cold star
If anything could wake him
Toil to wake earth's sleep

When pooh bah brass talk
Sacrifice and armaments
Remember pig iron

River Kwai
Decaying sleepers
The efforts of hell-bent men
pass under the bridge

Take Oak and laurel,
Our fortune of tears, and live
A spendthrift lover

Postman rings the bell
Summer of 1916
Each door the same news

First Day of the Somme
No time to be a hero
​My son asks for milk

Gardens at Changi 
Emerging from tangled roots
Promises of growth

Follow the numbers
Holocaust escalated
​With the Allied bombs
​
Remember shadows
Burned on the post office steps
​A boys tricycle

My grandfather said
For the sake of future peace
Shoot all officers

Cowra
As fleeting blossoms
Prisoners of history
Break out of the past

In the minute's silence
'Muffled solider's girls make out
Beating of war drums

Back to the future
First World 'History Wars'
Start digging trenches

History repeats
My melancholy duty
​History repeats

Parent-Teacher night
Polish grandmothers telling
​Tales from the gulag

Archduke Frans Ferdinand
I mean, who hunts Koalas?
He ought to be shot

Braced for the landing
Culture War veterans
Known unknown soldiers

Go tell the Spartans
First day of the Somme was spent
​Following orders

Clugston at Darwin
Cheered a burning Jap's attempts
To pull out of a dive