(AA) Canto 36: Steadfastnesses
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The most persistent sound which reverberates through man’s history is the beating of war drums
Arthur Koestler
Prisoners
I carried the false spirit force of sadness
wrapped in a brown sack in the pocket
of a worn, tweed coat
Adrian C. Louis
Humiliated by subhuman skill
The master race enacts its casting vote,
Feeling unsatisfied with a quick kill
They choose instead constriction by the throat;
So drag their prey
To Korolenko Street,
“Lets make them rue the day they damn’d us in defeat!”
Kuzmenko is the first to cry
Bull-clubb’d to the ground & shot,
Around Klimenko nail-fists fly,
Til left by bullets to rot,
Shouting, “Red sport will never die!”
Trusevich marks his spot,
Stood proud & tall in his goalkeeper green,
Soon blood-stain’d in the Babi-Yar ravine.
The news filter’d to the outside,
Dishearten’d Konstantin,
Deflated pride went to confide
With mother in an inn,
“Worry not,” opin’d Christina , “The final we must win.”
Kiev
September
1942
Operation Watchtower
Nay, I protest, though Death with his
Worst Counsel should divide us here,
His terrors could not make me fear
Lord Herbert of Cherbury
America, at last, enters battle,
Aslant volcanic isle rainforested,
Strange & stagnant, humid, pestilential,
By lizards & swarm’d insects infested;
When bugles blare,
Comes forth the fierce attack,
Banzais scything thro air silenced by CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!
Men throttl’d with furious rage
Midst the giant hardwood trees,
Mottl’d by squawking foliage,
Warm swamp-waters tickling knees,
Where, fell’d by Wars that others wage,
Full riddl’d with disease’
The last thing many marines would have seen
Were piercing chrystals’ fanatical glean!
Up, up went Nippon’s battlecry
Along the Bloody Ridge,
“Banzai!” “Banzai!” “Maline you die!”
Six hard days of carnage,
But like brave Barnes at Gettysburg defenders would not budge.
Guadalcanal
September 14th
1942
Urban Crucible
It isn’t me, someone else is suffering. I couldn’t.
Not like this. Everything that has happened,
Cover it with a black cloth
Anna Akhmatova
Paulus puts down the phone on der Fuhrer,
Flame-eyed gen’rals await its decision,
“Incontent for us to reach the Volga,
Each brick of this damn’d city must be won!”
With cautious voice
He order’d the advance,
Restricted of all choice, condemn’d to court with chance.
Immazed the Drang Nach Osten’s flow
All in the armpit carcass,
This hellish huge, grey grain silo,
Held by ragged defenders,
Dread lingers in the vast shadow,
Wylde shots blast at noises –
Where rages vicious hand-to-hand combat
In sewer, stairwell, cellar, shop-front, flat.
Pity the poor civilian,
Courageous troglodyte,
An alien subt’ranean
Defending its birthright,
This is its city, its property, its striving, its fight.
Stalingrad
September 19th
1942
Arctic Circle
It is fitting to mourn dead sailors,
To crown the sea with some wild wreath of foam
On some steep promontory
Vernon Watkins
The ice-encrusted look-out grew entranced,
Burnley’s ain blinking hyperborean,
A glowing polar coast capp’d the distance,
Snow-realms of Thule’s half-light Cimmerian;
Ship’s shadows plough’d
Northwards with proper care,
Rolling, pitching thro’ cloud, spray freezing in the air.
Jack Sumner shouts, day-in, day-out,
His convoy runs the gauntlet,
Batter’d & scatter’d by the kraut,
With many a sinking threat,
But well the British gunners fought,
Bursting the minefield net,
To be spotted by their Russian raven,
Who’d escort them safely to this haven.
They’d enter the ghostly harbour,
Discharge their martial bread,
Helping Russia hack down Hitler
In terrible bloodshed,
Then drown’d their thin-fray’d nerves with vodka in a drinking shed.
Archangel
September
1942
Crux
In the ruins a small light flickers,
there is someone alive there,
a fire clenched between his teeth
Iunna Morits
The Kremlin’s air grew heavy with the fate
Of the Russian empire & Stalin’s fame
S’tho standing at the Corinthian gate,
“We must save the city, she bares my name…
Not one step back!”
The motherland’s last hope
Shall beat back the attack, some Sumo at the rope.
Many a penal battalion
Ythrust into the battle,
Trapt twixt a foreign machine gun
& the Kommissar’s pistol,
How they charged in desperation,
Miracle survival…
Getting to grips as quickly as they could
Ev’ry second shedding Soviet blood.
The lucky few punctured the lines,
Cold steel coldly applied,
The siren whines, th’assault resigns
& when the blood had dried
One hundred Ruskis slept breathless but ten schweinhunds had died…
Stalingrad
October
1942
Innocent Blood
The Sun of Justice may withdraw his beams
Awhile from earthly ken, & sit conceal’d
In dark recess pavilioned round with clouds
George Bally
Kim was a slave! dragg’d from deep Korea
With countrymen he’d never met before,
Control’d by rifle butts, insults & fear,
Compell’d to help his masters with their war;
His island’s thrall
Another planet seem’d,
“Goddamn it!” Sergeant Hall, dreaming in the sunbeams,
“This place is hot!” “Sir, over there!”
“What?” “Asian looking fella…”
“Well shoot him then!” “But he don’t wear
No uniform?” “Private Mellor,
What clothes they wearin’ I don’t care,
S’long as he looks yella,
We’ll kill him ‘til this hell-hole’s neutraliz’d!”
The servant to the situation siz’d,
This galling deed has to be done
& rais’d an aim at Kim,
“I’m sorry son…” from shaking gun
A bullet rak’d thro’ him,
Dismantl’d from Humanity thro’ vanity & whim.
Guadalcanal
October
1942
Sand Lines
If you tear down the web I said
It will simply know
This isn’t a place to call home
Fady Joudah
Empire’s chains broken by the outlawry,
Exquisite lamps of freedom bars unbolt
From Taranaki to Tobermory…
But yet dig-in lads round some railway hut;
El Alamein
Hosts see-saw battles tense,
The weak-link of a chain or brinkflop subsequence.
As heavenforth the barrage spews
The flames of red of horizons
Cacophonies of carnage chews
The shells from a thousand guns
Announcing thats the Reich renews
Conquest with its weapons,
Whose panzers into power motion crank,
Whose drivers steer’d ivory-tower’d tank
Ears full of voices, wading thro,’
The voids of battletide,
When War’s just you, your tiny crew
& slitting lightshow slide,
When color in the sunlight rushes film-flash by outside.
October
Egypt
1942
American Achilles
The march gone by was glorious, this shall be
More glorious still. To one & all of ye
I speak.- Remember well what is done
JD Horrocks
Before three thousand Sendai Japanese
John Basilone led only two sections
Peppering machine gun posts thro’ the trees
Off-fending, with brutal vivisections;
Howls, rants & screams
In-hemming every side
While bullets flew in streams the bloodrops never dried.
Three days of neverstop attacks,
While rapid dwindle rations,
John dropping ninjas on their backs,
&, after the assassins,
Day dons, three nights, it’s jacket blacks,
Starsplash buttons fastens,
‘Til at the end him left with just two boys,
Face nothing but the hum of jungle noise.
For this is how a hero looks,
Cover them in glory,
Etch in thy books when at the crux,
Perilous & gory,
They fought by immortality writing down their story.
Henderson Field
October 25th
1942
Operation Supercharge
They were our comrades
Crowned with their youth;
See what they gave!
Tancred Agius
As dogged as at La Haye Saint they fought,
With sullen eyes fix’d on the blasted earth
For sudden shapes & shadows, target sought
Then caught them with a ‘fucking army’s worth;’
Six panzers cast
Amang the hummocks soft
Deliver dumb disaster while the caps were doff’d
To Monty in his element
Whose murd’rous mechanisms
Shall masticate all Germans sent
Sculpt waxwork paroxysms
E’er witherwards the Wehrmacht senr
Follows fatalisms
Shredded bodies burnt & mutilated,
But no! Death’s scythe’s not yet satiated.
“Napoleon once rode thro’ here!”
The shrinking sergeant said,
Whose single tear sprain crystal clear
Then on the sands was shed,
“This land is only bred for death…” bled out & join’d the dead.
Elaqqaqir
Nov 1
1942
Mumble Words 