Day 455

Burial of the dead

Kyiv remains the birthplace of inspiration and dubious celebrity, failed ambition, creepy sexuality, war-adjacent content milling and other really rather funny stories, including the liberation of Belgorod region (population: 1.5 million, 27,100 square kilometers, flat as a pancake).

It’s also home to zillions of one of the world’s liveliest flowers — lilacs.

Stefan has provided a run-down of military developments here, and Illia launched War Notes, a weekly newsletter for his 1.2 million buddies on Elon’s far-right social network. Isabel for the ultra-liberal The Washington Post also attempts to make sense of the mess, which you should not think too hard about or attempt to understand¹.

It all boils down to trolling Belarus and Russia. The gist of this post is no one knows what the fuck is actually happening, except maybe for the kids wearing cammies posting uplifting video clips to TikTok. Looking on the bright side, it might be a dress rehersal for the party being planned for western and southern areas of Belarus by the Kastuś Kalinoŭski Regiment.

In other news, this year’s lilac bloom is almost over. It lasted about three weeks.

Photo c/o abdymok

Which brings us to our Poem of the Day, The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot.

Here is the first part:

For Ezra Pound       il miglior fabbro.

              I. The Burial of the Dead

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers.

Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee

With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,

And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,

And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.

Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.

And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,

My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,

And I was frightened. He said, Marie,

Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.

In the mountains, there you feel free.

I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

1. Anti-Putin militias mount cross-border incursion in western Russia. (The Washington Post, May 23, 2023)