This IS that Day, the Sixth of June, storming the beaches of Normandy in the Allied push that led to the end of World War Two from the west. Driving the Germans from Occupied France, and on into Germany, meeting up with Soviet forces to destroy the Reich and bring down the unspeakable Evil of the Nazi regime.

But Evil has its own life and will, pops up here and there - - and, in our Time, has awakened rested and refreshed to reassert its inhumanity.

Evil: inhumanity, selfishness, greed, merciless cruelty, hatred. Humanity itself carries the inhumanity of the Evil gene, sometimes named as our pitiless crocodilian center, alive, active, and well in half of Americans.

How is it that we gather to destroy Evil in other lands, but not in our own?

Who hasn't read Revelation ought to: it's frightfully clarifying.

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God willing and Time goes on, a drive and quick visit to a Place of the Heart is on calendar for midweek. In our life there it was a place of roosters welcoming Dawn, which today's poem stirred for me to remember our very first Dawn, a July morning in 1984. The poem: read it, and then maybe we'll talk for a moment:

from “When the Rooster Announces the Dawn of Another Day”

Alain Mabanckou

^{translated by Nancy Naomi Carlson}

god turns his back on us

how to interpret
the tablet of laws
translate the portent
of night

for all was already transcribed

I’m not to blame
said the migratory bird
I was gone for the winter
my only crime
is to sport the same
plumage as those in my branch

nonetheless
the birds of your kind
have sinned in your name

one day the moon lodged a complaint
it was heard by the darkness

but the day erased the grievance of the moon

ever since
we have lost our memory

“Alain Mabanckou’s words are plain-spoken but powerful, deeply rooted in his relationship with his African homeland, from which he is exiled, due to the political upheavals that continue to ravage his country. Mabanckou draws much of his inspiration from the flora and fauna of his childhood, which, for him, simultaneously symbolize birth, life, and death—and the poetry that resides in us. He is steadfast in his belief that, in the absence of a supreme being, it’s up to us to save our humanity, as well as our planet.”
—Nancy Naomi Carlson

in re: Carlson's phrase "in the absence of," which we are too stupid, and imagine ourselves pious, to let sink in: "He has no hands but our hands," reads another poem and prayer, "to do His work today." God can and will do nothing on Earth to save us and our planet from our blind-to-self, godless inhumanity. We are on our own with the Dominion vested in us as from Genesis 1:26 & 28 רָדָה radah, "wa-radah, let them rule", let them have Dominion, lordship, a conveying of stewardship that we dishonor with every foul breath, and God who names God's self I Will Be That I Will Be, leaves us in charge - -

perhaps returning to God's self-assigned role of saying yehHEE.

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But every thought wanders off somewhere, doesn't it; and part of my wandering this morning has been into

God bless America, land that I love; stand beside her, and guide her, through the night with the light from above. From the mountains, to the prairies, to the oceans, white with foam - - but eighty years ago my child's misunderstanding sang "what with from" as I wondered what that could possibly mean: what with from, singing it lovingly and lustily no matter what.

A child hears what his great-grandfather does not and cannot hear: "what with from" wasn't the only incomprehensible line I sang. Comes to mind the Sunday morning on the way home from church I asked, "Mama, what's a Sino?"

A what?

A sino. "Jesus loves me, this Sino," what's a sino?

Another one finally worked itself out: "and forgive us our Krispieses, as we forgive those who Krispies against us."

"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I thought as a child, I reasoned as a child" rings well more than True for me. And when I became a man it became more than clear to me why God prefers us as children. So do I.

RSF&PraiseHim

SAGITA 452x69 arriving to load Kraft liner, thence to Moin/Colon