(AA) Canto 33: Mortal Struggles
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To delight in conquest is to delight in slaughter
Lao-Tse
Close Run Thing
In this leafy orchard is a nightingale,
a nightingale whose songs are the dawn
and take me into the light
Farzaneh Khojandi
Stalag Luft bustles cudgel-goons & drones,
‘How terribly boring,’ thought restless Bligh,
Now sauntering to Flight-Lieutenant Jones,
Who spies a twinklefox in Nigel’s eye,
“Tonight’s the night!
Are the cutters ready…”
Life’s value actions bright for life & liberty.
Stars fire & thro’ the wire they went
With never a half-look back,
Shunning Sol’s harvest fluorescent,
March’d thro’ night’s covering black,
The dark Black Forest three weeks spent,
They climb’d into a stack…
Dawn swallowing the last of her moonbeams,
The Ranz des Vaches resounding round their dreams.
To gunshot & Teutonic shout
They woke up with a fright,
Rough bundl’d out, fell’d with a clout,
They stood up to such sight…
Almost touching the Heaven slopes of some Helvetian height.
Hoch Finstermunz
March
1942
Axis Encounters
The world is changed with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
GM Hopkins
The Axis met, the Palace of Klessheim
Saw less a meeting, more a monologue –
Mussolini kept noticing the time,
By Ciano sitting like a nodding dog;
A dirge of hours,
Permitted, none, to smoke,
While Hitler on them showers an avalanche of talk.
“Comrades of the fascist Jihad
Let us combine our forces,
Strike from the southern launching pad,
Conquering the Caucasus,
A prompt capture of Stalingrad
Cuts off Red resources,
& following, roll up the Volga’s banks
To penetrate Moscow upon all flanks!”
Whom in that room could e’er resist
Daemonic charisma,
The mesmerist slams down his fist,
“Yes, let’s march together,
To meet Japan in India, then raze America!”
April 30
1942
Duty’s Call
I am maddened with words
and no-one has managed to tell me
why the men are killing each other
Lucia Sanchez Saornil
As colossal, topographical quilt
Forg’d from old photos of the coast of France
While Aimee Gardner watch’d her flowers wilt
She wonder’d if her snaps would stand a chance
To join the spread
& somehow help the war,
A flash of postal red, a letter thro’ the door…
…Her steam train scythes inside Euston
She foliates excited,
Her taxi drills her thro’ London,
Such handsome fancies sighted,
Met, then, Captain Selwyn Jones,
Who cigarette lighted,
Said, £what do you think of Germans?” “Hatred
Yes, violent hatred unabated.”
“Where are you from?” “Miralabeaux.
I’m French essentially,
My husband, tho’, was born in Bow,
He’s true blue bells Cockney;”
“Missions there are, but you must abandon your family…”
London
June
1942
Edda’s War
To be yourself not who you were taught
Not the shell in which you are caught
Not the trivia in which you are embroiled
Sudi Nshimiyimana
Principesse opulence entices
Those rich gerachi & their arch affairs,
Plagued by the instruments of their vices
“So boring now,” sigh’d Edda, to the air
Her Condor rose,
The Eastern Front awaits,
To tend the wounded rows & mend men’s broken fates.
The sun’s exsiccativity
Has drain’d the plains of verdure,
Where powerful velocity
& hours of droning tergure,
Observes no change but the gritty
Black stripes, brutal merger
Of arms, the like of which the world ne’er had
Those charr’d ski scars speeding to Stalingrad.
At last she fac’d the Red Cross tent
Among ochelic ranks,
“May I present Edda – Muss…” “Splint!
Now! Tell Il Duce thanks,
Now put this cunting apron on & scrub those fucking planks!”
Kotelnikov
August 3rd
1941
Swinging Pendulums
for everything in the room was blood-red.
On the window sill, the flowers almost dead.
And all our daily things smelt of the abyss
Leonid Martynov
The winter offensive melts with the snow,
Two great enemies lay down exhausted,
The roads dissolving to a muddy flow,
The front is fix’d, time swung to count the dead;
The German’s score
One million underground,
The Russians many more, what first titanic round!
“Comrades of the fascist Jihad
Let us combine our forces,
Strike from the southern launching pad,
Conquering the Caucasus,
A prompt capture of Stalingrad
Cuts off Red resources,
& following, roll up the Volga’s banks
To penetrate Moscow upon all flanks!”
The pendulum swings back due East,
Stalin’s armies pounded,
More men releas’d, the net increas’d,
All reserves surrounded…
To hoard such feasts of prisoners twelve fresh death camps founded.
Kharkov
May 12th
1942
Burma
Where he makes the rifles cough,
Stutter. Where the reveille
Is staccato majesty
Gwendolyn Brooks
Thro’ fetid swamps Basho drove his forces,
A filthy bunch of Scousers fell upon,
Had them tight-bound at their soft surrenders,
& order’d bayoneted one-by-one;
Blades wipen’d clean,
Under tropical moon,
They press on thro’ the steam to liberate Rangoon.
Thro’ monsoon & malaria,
With barely a bulldog stand,
The British army in Burma
Thro’ a jungle nightmare fann’d
“Yer on yer own fer India!”
The one clear-cut command…
Retreating, in fullness of confusion,
Leafy trails of chaos & destruction.
Basho cross’d the Irrawaddy,
Drove yon the border line,
Eyes sol-lit see raw junglerie
Upon the hills recline,
First bulwark of far-reaching Raj ‘neath Siva’s bleaching shine.
India
May
1942
Unread Letters
graves with girls.
taken too soon.
too brutal
Koleka Putuma
As Eleanor Stemmler felt herself good,
She couldn’t help but cringe beneath her hat,
Vile members of the Sicherheitsdienst stood
Behind her on the train, what awful chat!
As Russia fell
They’d roar’d all thro’ Ukraine
& drove the Jews to hell, two hundred thousand slain.
That night, with Max, she tried to share
This gossip from the sectors,
Horrescent rumours everywhere,
“Tis nothing but conjectures!”
Her husband huff’d, without a care,
Cold as debt collectors,
“But darling, what if, what if it’s all true?”
“But if it is, my love, what can we do?”
“My friend,” she said, “to Kaunus sent,
I’ve written twenty times…”
“Tis innocent, maybe they went
Elsewhere…” as midnight chimes,
Within the silence marital rise minds in violent crimes.
Berlin
June 2nd
1942
Australian Spit
Youth it enflames, but age it cheers,
I would go back, but not return
To twenty but to twice those yeers
Aurelian Townshend
‘The strongest man is mightiest alive,’
Remembers, each dawn, Shane Taylor Slater,
Determin’d, for his father, to survive,
Sensing chances come, sooner or later;
‘Til then, withstood,
All miseries & sun –
Like bluebells in a wood men wilted one-by-one.
To handle such sadistic sin,
Bear such crude brutality,
Phenomenal self-discipline,
Freed from personality,
Was vital, as with dog-bite grin,
Vanishes self-pity,
To live life in the present every day
& all those happy past-lives hold at bay.
For this is where true torture lies –
Not tied to bamboo cane,
Hounded by flies, as back & thighs
Bull-whipp’d by men insane –
Men’s captive reminscences bring them the upmost pain.
Burma
June 6th
1942
Midway
Our seraphs of white mercies
Shall hover around the ruin.
Their wings shall stream upon the flame
E.B.Browning
Nippon probes the fog-shrouded Aleutians
Those last, little islands near Hawaii,
Four flat-tops flying high the rising suns,
Their flagship, Yamamoto’s Akagi;
Up from the decks,
Like cranes leaving a lake,
Accelerant, convex, each ‘dauntless’ clouds uptake.
The dateline cross’d from east to west,
Men steel’d their hearts for valour,
Arising on horizon’s crest
Climbs the target carrier,
In single file planes faced the test,
As, at Balaclava,
The gunneries response is amplified
Crescendowards, ‘twas surely suicide.
The Yorktown sunk… by fate, by luck,
By broken naval codes,
Brewsters amuck those four ships struck,
& so, as Hampton Roads,
Those precious airstrips safely kept, the war’s one true crossroads.
Pacific Ocean
June 7th
1942
Mumble Words 