TODAY'S DICTATOR

                                                                                      30.5.2023

 

 

LAW NO MORE

March 2022

RUSSIA O RUSSIA

- WHAT GIVES YOU THE RIGHT?

April 2022

 

Russia O Russia

Do we see you now plain

With your masses complicit in crime?

Though your brave marchers few

Quickly hustled from view

May redeem in the passage of time.

 

What gives you the right

With such malice and spite

To lay others’ cities to waste?

Because of one man

And his barbarous plan

Is your land not forever disgraced?

 

And don't you recall

How back in the war

Your people were bombed and displaced?

And how you take pride

In how they defied

The Nazis and to them laid waste?

 

Now don’t you defile

Through this warfare so vile

Their devotion and blood sacrifice?

And hospital wards

And refugee hordes

Reveal its so pitiful price?

 

A young girl in tears

For the pets that she’d left

To starve in the rubble of town;

And flats opened wide

To the cold air outside

By brutish bombs raining on down.

 

The stories of pain

Which again and again

Are transmitted over the news,

Are too overwhelming

To lay out in verse

But will be long in the memory fused.

 

Now let the gentle the free and the brave

Step up to the challenge laid down,

Now let the lawmakers, crunchers of numbers

Work out the amends to be found.

 

Now let the fighters and warriors true

Who here do an empire resist,

Find that their strivings are met with success

With peace no more crudely dismissed.

 

And Russia O Russia

May you discover

The way to the pathways of ruth,

And not harden your heart

To forever depart

But open your eyes to the truth.

 

 

'In the end, hatred will disappear and dictators will die'

Volodymr Zelensky, President of Ukraine, 17/5/2022

 

'Forge arms in your defence to bear'

                               - P.B. Shelley

 

'Yet Freedom, yet thy banner torn but flying

Streams like the thunderstorm against the wind'

                                                                                                                                                                                  -  Lord Byron

 

 

UKRAINE DREAMIN'

 

June 2022

 

Come on let's dream a better future

Than the current horror show,

As laid out by a writer exiled

From Putinland he'd had to go.

 

 

Bearded, from a small room talking

With an uncertain life ahead,

‘How should things be?’ the question came

And this is roughly what he said:

 

 

'Ukraine and Russia have a past

Entwined in history's passing flow,

Closely bound and complicated

But from that past we have to go!

 

 

We have to think of both proud peoples

And their future lives and wealth,

And how to build prosperity

And how to build well-being, health

 

 

For the children of the future

So they perish not in mud and snow

Fighting for an old idea

No, from that past we have to go!

 

 

Catherine the Great and Greater Russia, 

Tsarist dreams and Stalin's crimes,

The coveting of wheatfield bounty

No, we must leave that behind!

 

 

I can see a path ahead 

Where our lands can safely go

And our descendents forward tread

Into the future they can grow. 

 

 

As a Russian I pay tribute

To the skills and industries

Of Ukraine and its fine people –

If they can thrive then why can’t we? 

 

 

If Ukraine wants to face the West,

Well, that's the way they want to go;

And so the path of least resistance

Is found by going with the flow.

 

 

In the world we now inhabit

We should be partners for the greater good:

Ukraine draws on Russian resources

Russia deals in trade not blood.

 

 

It would gain by resource trading

Its people gain from profit shared;

Ukraine busied with its business

And the world from hunger spared

 

 

So that's it, it's so damn simple

So damn simple – one, two, three!

So let’s cast off that bad old thinking

And as partners, neighbours be'.

 

 

And with that the image flickered,

And with that he disappeared,

Leaving me to mourn the now

Yet with a sense of foresight clear.

 

 

 

‘WHAT THEY CANNOT STEAL THEY  BREAK’

January 2023

 

'What they cannot steal they break'
A mindless envy so to slake;
If they cannot win in war
The child and woman must be shorn

 

Of heat and food and all those things
Collective minds and effort brings.
Leaving signs of savage reign

When forced from ill-deserved gain.

From havens safe both near and far
In last resort their birds of war

Prey on homes and human lives

With scruples none and fell allies

 

Now lies disguise these grotesque acts

With twisted truths and garbled facts;

So if in dreams truth does appear

Next day the court will make it clear

 

Those dreams are wrong and quite forbad

The dreamers will be classed as mad

And made to pay a hefty fine

So they will hedge their bets next time.

 

And yet, Russia, you can’t unleash

Such violence without creating grief

In your homes, your own backyard

Prepare to learn some lessons hard

 

Derived from living in the past

Refusing every single chance

To change and some new furrow plough…

We see you getting angry now

 

 

A forerunner of the foreign volunteers fighting for Ukraine

The story of Byron's contribution to Greek independence

and how a nation gained its freedom from an empire

 

 

 

 

 

Prometheus Unbound,

the concluding verse,

published in 1820

 

 

 

 

"To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy Power, which seems omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, not falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be
Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free;
This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory”

 

 

 

 

 

 

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