The innocents

We just refused to be part of it,
the generation of the world wars,
those who fought them enthusiastically,
those who defended the bombs of terror balance,
those who thought Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified,
those who liked the Nazis until they fell
and then the communists until they fell,
those who adopted materialism
and sold their lives to the slavery of Mammon
and raised rigid families adapting squarely
to lives of stale cubicularism
in a society of perfect capitalist consumerist order –
we wanted none of all that soul pollution
but wanted freedom and the right of love
to triumph over every kind of bondage,
and thus preferred beauty to the ugliness of modern man,
life in nature to the sterility of urban society,
and love to hate and war and freak politics.
We preferred natural innocence
to the guilt of modern man,
which we rejected with the wars and bombs;
and we were right, we are right still,
and history will make us right.