Those who lived it
are either too reluctant
to talk about it
or are left to
skepticism and disbelief
Either out of reluctance
to live it again
Or sheer fatigue to
talk about it
Incredulous and harrowing
as the experience may have been
Light and trivial it can turn
over a cup of tea and a biscuit
dipped just right
And then comes a time
'now or eventually'
when someone can't hold
the urge to crack a joke silly
or opine an advice with solemn air
on something that got over
half a century before
they were even conceived
Once a horrid reality
now reduced to three pages
in a textbook of history
Names and places mostly outdated
by latest/ gripe-y/ griped fashion trends
The reasons to know it
or to care to pretend to care about it
reduced to an essay for HSC
or a doctorate to complete
A war reduced to mockery
through sufferings trivialised
and subjected to objective disbelief
History reduced to story
in under a generation
of having lived it
Human memory has no room
for learning from other's experiences
however profound, however harrowing
And there is your reason
why history finds a way
to repeat itself
over and again
The real price of war
is in forgetting it.
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