At what lame moment
Did our reason slip,
To leave us march forever
Lost at the cause,
With all that sullen certainty
Our catalyst,
To crust our blood, red-rim us,
Dinosaurs.

All force dissolves! All future impulse
Drags at our chain,
While others leap and gyre
Where we would tread,
So long disused, encrusted now
With crippled minds,
We only walk where, in the past
We bled!

When did the spark
Become the hated cliché?
When did ‘we will’
Become the battered past;
It must have been when all eyes turned
To count the gains
That laurels fell, and turned to dust
At last!

David Lewis Paget