Lost Words

I felt all the poets of the city straining,
teeth clenched at the sight of dead words.
Forgotten or loved, either way, now gone,
a collection of thoughts now burned.
The cries of the past, the dreams of the silent,
the handwritten fragments of man;
Now gone, in one swift blow,
a piece of the soul, extinguished and lost,
the deed of illiterate leaders;
the new age has come, mechanical dreams
the hopeful future of earth.