Peg Boyers

After the War: Alien Letter
---after Catullus

You will find this weird, coming from a creature who landed in your midst, sudden and improbable as a flying saucer
but
I truly wanted to leave you with memories of elegant tea parties in gardens we had planted for you
in atriums of museums into which we had put the great art of your people, restored onto the pedestal it deserves.

I wanted to leave you humming the jazz tunes of our soldiers, the ones they had played in your cafes in the off-hours, tapping
to the beat of machine-gun drum riffs they used to improvise in the frenetic intoxication of their self satisfaction.

Instead, in the tradition of hospitality long established by war, we left you your dead
as a souvenir to remember us by.

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