And More to Come

You enter in the middle,
And you leave in the middle,
No matter when you enter,
And no matter when you leave.

Maybe you were the strange child,
The kind who considered lives
That ended before the great,
Terrible events began—

The person whose life finished
Days before the colonists
Were first sighted from the shore
In their ships like birds of prey,

The person whose life finished
Days before the start of war
And genocide that would smear
Whole villages from the map,

The person whose life finished
In painful old age, just days
Before the start of the plague
Started filling the mass graves.

They never knew, those persons,
Their world’s evisceration,
Which even then didn’t end
More people living more lives,

More generations being
Born in more middles of things,
Ending still in the middle,
Never knowing the next thing.