American troops on board a landing craft heading for the beaches at Oran in Algeria during Operation Torch, November 1942. Today I was reading a Victor Hugo’s poem which made me think why couldn’t I do something rather original: composing a poem while colorizing a picture, evoking the picture in words. I’m deeply sorry if this seems irreverent, but here it goes.

The bitter weaving holds the sound of the darkest scream beneath the bank. The sewed badge in the shoulder dies with the moans of white, red and black. As the ship approaches the dying shore, Its breath embosoms the crimson sand. And, as the filth of an unborn child, the men jump into a shore of wrath.

The helmets hold the hope of most, the grenades, the hands of twenty more, the uniforms turn into a deeper moan and the brave, gloomy men pray and cry without even reaching the rage’s coast. They shout the word of a dratted god, they confess their duties to the ghost of a flowing glory; today may be gone.

And the water embraces them all, with the sorrow of a widow’s cough, and it spits them all into the wall of blood, darter, and expired goals. Now, the fourteenth weave tries to bend the moral of the mysterious men who perished in the glazed arms of a far, pitiful, unknown land.