(AA) Canto 31: Dangerpitch
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‘A soldier’s life is terrible hard,’ says Alice
A.A.Milne
World War
Hurry, oh fast-flying Time, fly more quickly!
In my new armour I faint, I am choking.
I shall alight, with Death holding my stirrup
Mikhail Lermontov
Rommel is retreating to Gazala,
Barbarossa nears annihilation,
Closing net sets Hitler to the ponder,
Torn open by timely escalation;
With vital blow
An ally ne’er vanquish’d
Has ridden to the show in ways he would have wish’d.
Summoning the Reichstag android
Rose Hitler, virulently,
“We cannot this world war avoid –
The responsibility
Of that half-Judaiz’d, negroid,
Capitalist country!
Standing side-by-side with the Emperor,
I have declared against America!”
Whi
As the claque joy demonstrated
A twinge shook Goering’s gut,
His long waited, ever-fated,
Mad nightmare nailing shut,
A Reichmarshall woe-whispering, “Now Deautschland is kaput!”
Berlin
December 11th
1941
Resettlement
Stooping in solemn grief, down the muddy trek
Moves the sad cortege. The scrawny little nag
Slowly draws the hearse, stretching its long neck
Vojislav Ilić
The Star of Poland, stitch’d in yellow band,
Marks the arm of every human Jew,
That on the pack’d platform with Grunfelds stand –
A cattle wagons clatters into view;
Peasant & Priest
Into that cramm’d space sent,
Trains lurching to the East, towards resettlement.
As frightful freights of pity flow,
Desperation stagnates air,
One welcome smile softens the blow,
Waited Jakob calmly there,
To lead them thro’ a grey ghetto,
A flat for all to share –
Two rooms & one tiny lavatory
Was all there was to host his family.
Nikki slipp’d to the ghetto wall,
The sign ‘Verboten’ said,
Chasing the roll of her wee ball,
The sentry shot her dead…
Wailing kinah to side & sheloshim the Grunfelds sped.
Warsaw
December
1941
Death of Khan Stemmler
He said to us, his eyes like candles,
“Men! Isn’t Moscow there behind us?
Let’s die for Moscow now
Mikhail Lermontov
All across the front the counter-strikes start,
Spurr’d on by vengeance, Stalin & Smirnoff,
It seems as if the ghosts of Bonaparte
Have fled the cannonades of Kutuzov;
Adolf aghast,
Thin hair afleck with grey,
“The army will stand fast, we must not fight like Ney!”
Footed firm with heavy losses
Germans slow the grand Russian,
But now invincible hubris
Defeated to depression,
Like Sargon’s curs’d calamiities
With the Kullumaean…
Without his fingers, toes & half-a-nose
Khan staggers lifelorn thro the drifting snows.
CRACK! CRACK! He falls awrith with pain,
Snow red-stain’d where he bled,
The warm breaths wane, the bloody mane
Of some befang’d wolfshead
Brushes his cheek, rips out his throat… today the pack well fed.
Russia
Christmas Day
1941
Malta Silenc’d
So they buried her, & turned home,
a drab psalm
hanging about them like haar
Kathleen Jamie
Christmas passes &, without a victor,
Hitler curses Calypso’s hardy isle,
From whose short airstrips, serving Valetta,
Afric’s convoys attack’d mile-after-mile;
As Rommel starv’d,
Suez vein flows open,
Sundering forces, halv’d twyx Saxons & Russian.
Malta’s besieg’d by brutal means,
As Mussolini’s navy
Convok’d bloodthirsty Hagarenes
Who’d throttl’d her from the sea,
Old churches blown to smithereens
By codotteiri
Leading Luftwaffe; air-stips pulveris’d,
At last this pestilence is neutralized!
Merchantmen to Sicilia’s
Fair shores of saffron flow,
Thro’ siestas topless sailors
On decks spread tranquilo;
Below, tanks gloop with petrol to ride the Libyan plateaux.
The Mediterranean Sea
January 4th
1942
The Final Question
You’re our country’s lost property
with no office to claim you back.
You’re polluting our sounds. You’re so rude.
Jussawalla
Heydrich receives Hitler’s whim thro’ Himmler,
Schutzstaffel konferenz to Wansee borne,
Yachts dallying on a gentle water
Sumptuous luncheons laid on level lawn;
Gfromfinger-licks
& champagne guzzl’d hard,
Men dawdl’d thro’ dorics of a v
“The time hath come for Endlosung,”
Chirp’d Heydrich over brandy,
“The very last blood-drop be wrung
From the Jews methodic’ly,
& spare us not avenging young,
Raise hands if you agree…”
This act of villain faith wraithweevils share,
Adds Eichmann, “Let us breath, a cleaner air…
At Auswich an innovation
Successfully was tried,
The gas Zyklon… deportation
Shall drain Europa wide,
In fifty months more than ten million Jews will have died…”
Berlin
January
1942
Soviet Stoicism
at regular intervals,
one dry leaf after another
falls from the tree
Vinod Kumar Shukla
Snow falls with a blizzard-bitter harshness,
Yet onwards, ever onwards, rolls the war,
God mighty canon-Krupps sent to oppress,
The celebrated ‘Venice’ of the Czar;
Constant shellfire
Rains down on every side;
No redoubt to retire, no bunker for to hide.
Despite worsening misery
Of the hungry, cold half-dead,
Men kept alive through poetry
& the sawdust in their bread,
But none hold onto sanity
With bellies barely fed,
Beloved pets spit roasted, streets of fear
As first few little children disappear.
Krasnaya fills with men & guns,
Oktober’s famed parade,
The sights of sons & fathers stuns,
The women in the shade,
Saluting Vladamir’s statue off to the front they fade.
Leningrad
January
1942
British Ocean
I will go & lie inside his body,
Go down in the sea where they buried him,
& stay with him there
Ifaluk Atoll
The waters of the world a wild whirlpool,
Ships sucking into sub-infested seas,
Here wolfish packs of hunter-slayers rule
Across convulsing convoys, like disease!
Atop the main,
Tho,’ Germans second best,
Like fleets of France & Spain, & bottled up in Brest!
Three German warships & their men
Desperate for home waters;
Scharnhurst, Gneisnau, Prince Eugen,
Adash the Channel waters,
Courting no man with Nelson’s ken
Commands Britain’s forces,
With English radarstreams cleverly jamm’d
They’ll run the flimsy gauntlet to Deutcshland.
Amid Hanseatic safety
& the Norwegian fjords,
Hitler’s navy rejects the sea
& slowly rots the boards,
Imprinted on their psyches is the sharp of Deptford’s swords.
Coast of Europa
Feb 15th
1942
Fall of Singapore
Blowing from the west,
Fallen leves gather
In the east
Buson
The Tyger of Malaya gains his name,
The teeming jungles stain by bosky blood,
On England’s empire comes an eastern claim,
Built as it is on soft, tropical mud;
An army runs
Pell-mell to Singapore,
Where vital forts & guns stuck on the southern shore.
Shane Slater fed into the fight,
A total, bloody shambles!
Watches Shonan, the Southern light,
Fair cauldron of world peoples,
Bow meekly to the Tyger’s might,
Tyrant without scruples,
Dehumanizing all who surrender
“Cowards call yourselves, kill yourselves better!”
Miserable, defeated men
Choke the road to Changi,
Shot & beaten, none have eaten,
Luckless & footweary,
Facing uncertain futures in useless captivity.
Singapore
February 16th
1942
Manzanar
What longs to leap is impassioned
As the sound of strings he tuned and strummed,
Pulled, plucked and put aside for years
Anand Thakore
The Feds are swooping down on the Issei,
Arresting them for racial ancestry,
But left alone both Gerry & Iti,
Yes! even tho’ those lands the enemy;
From recent years
To Fourth Generation,
Pleas fall on empty ears… “But we’re American!”
As smirching citizens intern’d
In barracks’ concentration,
Precious land liberties were spurn’d
Despite the proclamation
Sign’d by the free, a freedom earn’d,
When, in celebration,
Each Fourth July confetti showers fall –
A child looks up at the camptowers tall
& with a frown did ruminate
On gunmen in the sky,
So to the gate where green men wait
She skipp’d & ask’d them,
“Why Am I in here?” they could not say nor could they simplify.
California
February
1942
Mumble Words 