We dress our ruins in silk and wine,
pretend the cracks were by design,
as if the ash was always bloom,
as if the coffin was a room.
The knife becomes a silver spoon,
the silence hums a sweeter tune;
we call the poison vintage red,
and kiss the lips that left us dead.
Memory’s lens, a cunning liar,
turns funeral smoke to holy fire,
rewrites the war as gentle play,
and makes us beg to stay that way.
But peel the gloss, the bones are bare — it wasn’t beauty, wasn’t fair.
The past was teeth, it drew its rent;
we only love it in retrospect.
- JJ