Seventy-nine years ago, June 6 1944, our United States military forces joined with the British and our other Allies to enforce the beginning of the end for hitler’s nazi regime. A vast, intricately planned surprise attack was launched across French beaches on Normandy. That D-Day Attack would ultimately culminate in the defeat of hitler’s nazi attempt to destroy our civilized world.
Today, June 6, 2023, I was pondering what had happened in that amazing D-Day manuever. While contemplating the immense necessity—and success— of that offensive initiative, an old poem came to mind. . . The Second Coming. Irish poet W. B. Yeats composed it in 1919, when the terrible World War I had just been ended; World War II was just a distant nightmare that nobody could imagine as the World War I was just concluding.
Yeats’ poem prompted me to compose a 21-century rumination, using his verses as a framework for my view of what is happening in our world of 2023.
Burning and burning the Ukraine in fire
The Destroyer will not hear our world cry;
Things blow apart; the attacker will not stop,
As more warfare destroys European peace.
The fire-rimmed flame is lit, and everywhere
The ceremony of orthodoxy’s misused;
The Rus lack all decency, while dissidents
Fill putin prisons.
Surely some deliverance is at hand:
Some long-remembered June 6th command.
A Kievan D-day Plan! Dare we hazard
Such a Hope as Euro Nato
To oppose the slings and arrows of putinian ire!
A shape with czarist body but stalinist head,
with gaze as blank and pitiless as snow
imposing gulag gloom on Ukrainian bloom
casting shadows of misplaced third reich doom.
The darkness barks again; so now we fear
that a century of Euro sleep
is vexed to nightmare by a Goggish bear,
and what rough beast, its hour come at last,
slouches down from Moscow to make Europe torn?
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