(AA) Canto 44: Regimes
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It is easier to start a war than to end it
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Invasion of Italy
We are all in the midst of the journey
seeking the road home
in the vast universe without
Kassim Ahmad
“What is it all for, love & peace & war,
When both the wide way’d Earth & Man’s action
Remain as constant as the Northern star?”
Muse three old, mid-day crones down the station;
Their wise old eye
Translates the censor’d news,
Watching the trains pass by pack’d with Palermo’s Jews.
From harbours of Tunisia
Arab maidens sang goodbyes
To a fabulous flotilla
Form’d to ferry the Allies
To sandy old Sicilia,
Neath luscious sommerskies,
Overwhelming the unprepared beaches
Of shell-shock’d, co-axial defenders.
The scenery invokes the gleam
Of early Punic Wars,
When first the dream by hawk Tireme
Brought yon the Roman shores,
Spreading Hellenic legacy – cultura, learning, laws.
Panormus
July 10th
1943
General Patton
We are stampeding to end stampedes
We are fighting for lambs
Who are never likely to be born
Osbert Sitwell
Patton hot-steps onto the Gela plain,
With shoulder-pads & ego equal wide,
Ambitious utterly for this campaign,
A contest perfect for his buxom pride;
His bow unbent
No foeman could withstand
As Axis soldiers sent skidaddling inland.
The general struts ‘cross the stage
In a shiny, armour’d car,
All round his green swards come of age
In the the dusty hards of war,
Envisioning a full front page
Lures him like a lodestar,
“Step to it boys, come on, the Truman Trot!”
“Geeze boss, five miles an hour, its far too hot.”
The city chants, ecstatical,
“Down with Mussolini!”
Once beautiful the capital
Of citrus Sicily,
In war’s rough wake looks dead & lifeless like a leafless tree.
Palermo
July 23rd
1943
Escape from Colditz
God heard the embattled nations sing & shout
‘Gott strafe England’ & ‘God save the King!’
God this. God that, & God the other thing
JC Squire
Bligh look’d upon the verdant Molden vale,
Sheer schloss serenely firmamentward shoots,
So foreboding he grew a chloric pale,
Heart sinking to the bottom of his boots;
Oflag IVC,
Cold castle for bad boys,
Broad gates bolted firmly with such soul-scarring noise.
Oer the claustrophobic courtyard,
After evening’s cramp’d apell,
He watch’d the patterns of the guard,
Felt familiar feelings swell,
“I’ve made a plan, it sounds quite hard,
But best give it a bell!”
He told the season’d escape officer,
“Yes, good luck, it’s time we hit another…”
Nigel appear’d quite debonair
In German uniform,
Snook down the stair with perfect care,
Dropp’d where bright flashlights comb,
Brush’d off the dust, saunter’d outside & headed off for home.
Germany
July
1943
Elusiveities
Impetuous brains mistake the signs of God
Too easily. God would not have me waste
My zeal for Him in this wild enterprise
Lascelles Abercrombie
So long as tongue can build a home for song,
They’ll sing of Yeo Thomas all thro’ France,
Who parachuted in to live among
A secret army waiting for its chance;
To strike a blow
Against the thronging scum,
A struggle long & slow, “When will the Allies come?”
Thro’ brutally black market streets
To cafes of fine choosing,
Each flat-cap Maquis captain meets
Him, hearing “Hitler’s losing!”
In flawless French, as when John Keats
In a swansong’s musing,
Sang sweetly his La Belle Dame Sans Merci –
Fac’d with Gestapo grease or Police Vichy,
“Votre visage familier,”
He met with a polite,
“Vous faites erreur mon bon monsieur…
Some trick, perhaps of light…”
Then sped away by metro like a kestrel in the night.
Paris
July
1943
Turning Tide
Remember our transient life;
It takes months for a body to form,
Alas, a mere instant to go
Guru Arjan
Kertsch morphing from hope to emergency,
Its little instigator kept his cool,
Musing upon this news from Sicily,
“It must be a feint, they think me a fool!”
”Turn from assault,
From now spurn all attacks,
In Balkan hills we’ll halt them Allies in their tracks!”
& so, with all reserves coop-flown
The Wehrmacht cuts its losses,
Their Eastern Front by barrage blown,
Then sliced in two by sappers,
All round them enemy hath grown,
Asiatic faces:
A Turkestani waves the red flag high,
Storming the bridge ice-shrapnel splic’d his eye,
So drops the flag, soon waving proud
Clutch’d by some Kamchatkan,
Pick’d from the crowd a bullet cloud
Slays in decimation –
Flag rais’d by an Irkutski, always forward to Berlin!
Suska
July 12th
1943
Bombing Rome
A terrible change is come: I see a cloud
Brooding over the valley like the wing
Of a destroying angel dark & dread
CL Reddell
As a glass of wall-slung crystal shatters
Twenty-three years of servitude levell’d
By the wind, this Fascist dream in tatters
Italy dechatellis’d, dishevell’d
Whose streets accrue
Such celebrations wild
With Mussolini universally revil’d,
When pictures of his pated heads
Are gripp’d with force & fury,
Then ripp’d up, spat on, torn to shreds
The rage of the Azzurri
Rough-rip Fascisti from their beds
Judging without jury,
Serve beatings bloody, when swift to respond
With just one long wave of his hated wand
Ausonia he occupies
& bombs soon drop on Rome,
The Pope hard tries to soothe the sighs
Of those who’d lost their home
His white smock smear’d in Latin blood, tears shining in his eyes.
Albano
July 19
1943
Ousting Il Duce
In the blue span of heaven the stars appear
To wait, all gathered round;
& listen, listen! how the pipes sing clear
Giovanni Pascoli
Italia! nearest heaven on Earth,
To poetry thou art the perfect foil,
Where suckl’d Rhea’s sacred sons from birth,
Mars roams again across the blood-stain’d soil!
As capital
Suffers bombs midst beauty,
The Grand Fascist Council has summon’d Il Duce…
The coup chair’d by Badaglio,
“Our contree is in turmoil,
Thus, Mussolini, ‘YOU MUST Go!”
Fat man’s blood begins to boil,
He look’d around, “Et tu Ciano!?”
Caught in a traitor’s coil,
Dismiss’d summararily by the King
Arrested next, nursing a broken wing,
Was planted on this a pirate isle
Of coves & cliffs & peaks,
To the while in strict exile,
Where soft the old sea speaks
Of reliques of more handsome days, memorial antiques.
Ponza
July 27th
1943
Robbing Europe
He works with a darkness
behind his eyes,
understanding as he does
Owen Sheers
Long train’s pulling into stazione
Out steps green Goering, in silk pantaloons,
Kommandeering the art of a country
Pocketing Europe’s beautiful dubloons;
Such bandit runs
The Reichsbank vaults imbue,
When under Nazi guns who would dare to argue?
This perfum’d, man-mountain of flab
About Golconda lurches,
Conducting graceful smash & grab
On galleries & churches,
This Raphael, that marble slab
Kindling taste entices –
A jackal trawling thro’ those gilded stalls
Collecting choicest items for his walls.
He loaded stalwarts of rare art
Into his carriages,
As engines start, to ease his heart,
Thro’ thick ringed fingers
Bright gems cascade for men self made need re-assurances.
Rome
August
1943
Escape from Treblinka
At night, under the heavy burden
Of their dreams, their jaws move,
Chewing a non-existent turnip
Primo Levi
They’d heard the news, they knew the end was near,
Lugubrious, life pass’d knee-deep in death,
But now, O day of God, the day is here!
When valour fills the spheregusts of each breath;
The storeroom seiz’d,
Its weapons handed out,
The panickers appeas’d, the worried drain’d of doubt,
As one, four hundred storm the camp
& pierce the wire to freedom,
Thro fields soon rumbling with the stamp
Of soldiers searching for them,
“Hide down there man, it might be damp,
But away I’ll lead them
& free you when the coast is clear, dear friend!”
“Thank-you,” hugs Jankiel as his feet descend
Those cellar steps, those secret stones,
Those keepers of his fate:
Treblinka groans, Treblinka’s drones
Were his to rubricate,
Whatever fallen Nazis in the future fabricate.
Maliszewa
August 2nd
1943
Mumble Words 