Out Across the Balcony
TWO YEARS ON, we are through the other side of the Pandemic. We pay a high price the world over. But something worse happened at 3.59 am on Thursday 24 February 2022.
Despite constantly repeated public assurances not only from Kremlin ambassadors, even from the mouth of Vladimir Putin himself that Russia had no intention of invading Ukraine, Russia then invaded Ukraine.
Within 72 hours, it would occupy Kyiv, install a puppet government, and then commence the subjugation and systematic destruction of the Sovereign Nation of Ukraine, which would include banning the Ukraine Language, and doing that in Ukraine, that Nazi Germany also did in Ukraine 81 years ago.
Putin does not have the Einsatzgruppen following behind his invading forces to wipe out swathes of Ukraine's civilian population. That would come later. He did have Crematoria gangs following; their aim, to cremate the fallen invading Russian conscript soldiers.
You attack, you fight, and you die. You are hastily cremated. Eventually, back home families will be told, not informed, that their husbands, sons, brothers, uncles, and cousins, are missing and presumed killed. Their loss is of no interest. They cannot be found because Ukraine has devilishly destroyed all traces of them.
A year on, Russia is discovering that no matter how one can look the part, if armed forces are not professional and of the highest calibre, then things are going to go very quickly wrong for them. And indeed they did. But Russia has a viciousness that western nations cannot fully fathom. About which, more later.
Standing here at this window
It is as if time is standing still.
We did not know this was coming.
When we realised it might be,
We preferred to believe
that reason would prevail in the last moment.
A year on,
The evidence sets the charge
Convicts
And simply awaits the Sentence.
O Three Fifty Nine
on a cold Thursday, February Morning
Lit the Taper
That lighted taper glows
I look back over my shoulder
There is a breeze of the Sea
But not pleasant
Chechnyan war crimes
Thousands killed,
Thousands more raped
Thousands more, still, tortured
A brutality
to be repeated in Georgia
And under whose watch?
A man without soul or spirit
A man whose winter red-grey snow coat
carries with it the stench of death
The Taper continues
It seems to be speeding up now
History may well indeed
report that O Three Fifty Nine
Was the Opening Gambit
of World War III.
That breeze has turned foul.
I will go in now
and draw the curtains.
If you believe,
Maybe you should ask your god …
What are you playing at?
Why do you allow these earthquakes?
These famines?
These Wars?
This unbridled evil?
If you are even there,
I can’t help thinking
You’ll reply, “Nowt to do with me ~ it’s human nature
which by its very ‘nature’ is naturally foul.
15 February 2023
All Rights Reserved
© Kenneth Thomas Webb 2023
A YEAR ON, the Pandemic persists, the UK comes outs of its third lockdown and Europe sadly enters its third lockdown. We have the ugly spectacle in the expression ‘vaccine wars’, created by bureaucrats and politicians, politicians unable to keep a firm rein on their bureaucrats, and fanned by an adversarial press. Worldwide, the pandemic has claimed 2,715,652 lives, with 554,104 in the USA, and 126,026 in the United Kingdom. A Year on, sometimes, reason and logic are so far removed, one wonders whether we are in an Alice in Wonderland scenario leaning towards Dante’s Inferno …
We knew this was coming
We knew not how it would manifest
We know we have to comply
These restrictions
Soon a memory to be discussed
But at this hour, now …
We must put aside our selfishness
We must adapt ourselves
In this self-discipline
We’ll discover
New qualities,
New perspectives,
Hidden Depths
A greater, more respectful
understanding of our planet
Let us brace ourselves
to the common good
Let us brace ourselves
for the loss of some we love
Let us determine that this
must never happen again
20 March 2021
All Rights Reserved
© Kenneth Thomas Webb 2022
Written 26 March 2020
We knew this was coming …
Ken Webb is a writer and proofreader. His website, kennwebb.com, showcases his work as a writer, blogger and podcaster, resting on his successive careers as a police officer, progressing to a junior lawyer in succession and trusts as a Fellow of the Institute of Legal Executives, a retired officer with the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, and latterly, for three years, the owner and editor of two lifestyle magazines in Liverpool.
He also just handed over a successful two year chairmanship in Gloucestershire with Cheltenham Regency Probus.
Pandemic aside, he spends his time equally between his city, Liverpool, and the county of his birth, Gloucestershire.
In this fast-paced present age, proof-reading is essential. And this skill also occasionally leads to copy-editing writers’ manuscripts for submission to publishers and also student and post graduate dissertations.
