Inside Yeats' Byzantium

Europa, Europa

And over and over the mockers mock
And the brutish bellow like a donkey brays.
Europe withers like an orchid in the heat.
It staggers like an old man and gasps for a drink.

Like an old cistern that is filled with trash,
Their empty churches molder and leak.
Like a library full of illuminated books,
But the whole population is unable to read.

The monarchists were right! The people are fools.
They cannot choose leaders or find their way.
They massacred the Messiah People among them,
Then mocked the Messiah followers’ faith.

Their little bigots, they call them prophets,
Whose manifesto reads, “You are the hollow men.”
And hollow they became, withered and parched,
And no one knows where to find a drink.

Like floodlands protected by levees and dikes,
Their skinheads and marxists are rotten and weak.
The seas rise and the flood rumbles
And the parched people only choke in the heat.

Their children already cry, "water, water!"
But no one hears them, or finds them a cup.
The dams will break, like Byzantium's did,
And choking they’ll drown in a Muslim flood.