What Remembrance is this?

"Traveler, beware: keep
a curious eye on the glooms of the highway,
the mysterious crowding the walls."
...................Pablo Neruda

a.
Traveler,
what remembrance
Is this?
The hurried warning.
The trains, the smoke,
The whips.

Who are these brides
dressed in numberless
yards of mourning.
Where are the grooms
with their grinning skulls
dancing a puppet's dance.
Rising out of ash.

And what of history
with its gaunt smile
like an orphan
waking from its bed
of euphemisms,
crawling forward
amputated
at the knees, spilling
cups of blood
that out of love
and the sins
of our fathers we
might in remembrance
drink.

There's no use hiding it,
man is a drawer of water.
A hewer of wood.
He builds
concentration camps
and drowns babies.
When his Gods perish
and he forgets his past,
the world turns inside out
like a transforming negative;
black where it should be
light where
man becomes a wasp
filling his belly
with venom before
he strikes.

b.
Swallowing the pain
of existence;
of promises and desires
unfulfilled;
we are bound to walk
barefoot over broken glass
through this valley
of numbered days,
the grief of remembrance
branding our flesh.

Know that the battle
waged in each of us
is for all of us and like
a Tibetan prayer
song or Mandela of satin
and bone
our passage
is a trail of blood
giving back to the gloom
its dues.

c.
History breathe deep.
Be encompassing.
Speak of the terrible
terrors we would escape
as we sleep;
that in our running
away we don't run toward
what in ourselves
we fear the most.

Heave with the sweat
of the personal
that we may wrestle
that metaphysical bull
in ourselves
to the ground
and like a fallen angel
choking with dust,
dragged to our knees
suck up the honesty
of our own grieving
juices purloined
from its throat.

In speaking
for yourself speak
for us all
at the moment of
our seduction
into that labyrinth,
that gloom of highway,
of good and bad,
of past, future,
and present tense,
toward the unknowable
we are bound
there to confront
the glowing red eye
of the bull, the violence
in ourselves.
Our own destruction.