(AA) Canto 46: Spiritgrind
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Where there’s life there’s hope
Terence
Savage Rape
Look how rough & coarse my fingers are!
I dug ditches close to the city, hammered
together rough coffins
Ol’ga Berggol’ts
“At last! At last! The bastards are going
& we shall know freedom!” sings Christina,
All round evacuation full flowing,
Rejoiceful, she turn’d the calm road’s corner;
But froze, face grey,
Four soldiers hanging there,
Into an alleyway they dragg’d her by the hair.
The spittle spat with hate & spite,
Lashing out with fist & tongue,
For love of life she put up fight,
But of course they were too strong
& raped her thro’ the dead of night,
None of them thought it wrong
To throw her barely breathing in a bin…
Next morning found by frantic Konstantin.
By now those Germans were long gone
& there his mother died,
An old Russian gave him a gun,
Clutch’d tightly as he cried,
“I shall avenge my family!” such hate to rage inside.
Kiev
November 6th
1943
Blood Schism
Why are you so cold?
& why do you lie with your eyes shut?-
You are not very old
Stevie Smith
“This lunatic age” sighs Friedrich Stemmler
Battling elesovetskies tooth & nail,
Will kill us all…” “Silence!” roars his father,
“The Fuhrer is the one who shall prevail!”
“But I have heard
Such horrors of the East,
To win this war absurd, our armies are deceas’d.”
“Hitler shall make right everything!”
“But Herr Hitler’s a buffoon!”
“Say one more word & I shall bring
The Gestapo to this room”
“Max! What the hell are you saying?”
This man was not her groom,
“Cover yourself in shame – he is your son!”
Huff-fac’d Max puff’d off, rough with what he’d done.
“Perhaps, perhaps, Friedrich was right,
But how, how could this be?”
They sat that night, silent, polite,
United family,
“Father, they are recruiting for backwater Normandy.”
Berlin
November
1943
Intellectual Rebellion
I tore down my thoughts
roped in my nightmares
remembered a thousand curses
Ishmael Reed
Despite enosomanian mis-state,
Some hear for certain, some the truth yet speak;
Enlighten’d few, refusing malform’d fate,
Take supper with Von Moltke every week;
Form’d to allay
The Brown Plague that renews
Its bloodbath every day, with vodka, hock & views.
As the field hare from a spaniel
Whips & darts, discussions flow,
“Armies without a general,”
States Von Stauffenberg, quite slow,
“Become unoperational…”
“Assassination?” “No!”
Von Moltke burst, “Hitler & his party
Must live to bare responsibility!”
To muse on Germany’s defeat
Strictly is forbidden,
But minds here meet as chaffless wheat,
Open hearts unhidden,
Share thoughts of tower’d ivory in stately-lidded den.
Kreisau
November
1943
Savage Battle
Ayla feels
that this start of the new day
is the end of the world
Gelu Vlaşin
As tho’ sailing on dreamy manoeuvres,
The majesty of air-space deem’d complete,
Protected by twelve aircraft carriers
America has launched a battle fleet
At the Gilberts,
Where surged the young marine,
Tween cool volcanic spurts yclad in em’rald green.
Lush saplings rush in from the sea
& plung’d into the cauldron,
Tho’ courageous mamertini
They moulder’d by the dozen,
Boys screaming out “Mommy! Mommy!”
Held pendulous chaudron…
Safe only in the space where Amtrak rolls
Unless, above them, snipers in the boles.
The twin-cylinder’d flamethrower
Blazes holes & trenches,
No surrender, “The Emporer!”
Such a grisly business,
Barely a handful faced disgrace, rest are sable corpses.
Tarawa
November 20th
1943
Bombfall
We there, in strife bewildering,
Split blood enough to swim in :
We orphaned many children
Thomas Love Peacock
That old maxim, ‘two wrongs don’t make a right,’
Forgotten on the so-call’d ‘Master Race,’
Trafalgars of death bombers every night,
What terrors on a new-born baby’s face;
A droning noise
Comes crawling from the west,
As Churchill’s Murder Boys face their most fiercest test.
Thro’ shudder-skies aflak with shot
Muscles ack-ack fully-flex,
Bombs rattle from a pepperpot
On a virous Volkssturm vex,
Dropping on them what London got
But plenish’d quadruplex,
Ths is the night aggressive war blazed home,
As when the son of Gunderic razed Rome.
As empty ten thousand shelters,
When sounded the ‘All-clear,’
Coriaceous, emotionless
Watching a lynch mob near
This ruin’d British airman begging wounded, sobbing fear
Berlin
November 24th
1943
Home Run
Oh, yes! With uncertain pace
I trod your forest lands,
And on your river banks
Jose Rizal
Bligh gazed upon the golden coast of Spain,
Desanlace of this latest aventure,
Saw only friendly faces on the train,
Far from those at the start of his saga;
Back in Colditz,
Nervy, knife-edge moments,
With Fritz checking tickets & well-forged documents.
He rode his luck to Switzerland,
Compassment the Northern Star,
At Geneva he shook the hand
Of a man named Jean-Francois,
They drove thro checkpoints seldom mann’d
To Perpignan, by car,
Where with a gourd of wine, a quart of cheese,
Young Miguel guides him cross the Pyrenees.
The Holy Grail! Empiric Rock,
His heart leapt up to see,
In sublime shock he made a dock
Of the Royal Navy,
“I am an escaped airman, could you spare a spot of tea?”
Gibralta
December
1943
Jaded Dreams
Such his arrows crossed inviolate regions,
that the rivers scarcely dared to enter,
and such he was pouring out his heroic legions
Jose Santos Chocano
Encaved in a distant reality,
Good German blood staining his vegan hands,
Entranced by ghosts & Himmler’s theurgy,
His officious imperium still stands;
While one-by-one,
His cities well destroy’d
The Allies prime weapon has dragg’d him to the void.
As Hercules donn’d last tunic
& died by his own poison,
Throughout the Reich, full bubonic,
Spread his proud war’s contagion,
Reduces homes to ash & brick,
Morbid devastation!
A bulletin! For him a worse bombshell,
Most of the VI sites destroy’d as well!
He rampaged with his jaundiced eye,
“This must be treachery!”
Drugg’d blood-supply soaring sky-high,
The traitor, “Who is he?”
Clinging sadly to slender threads of dwindling destiny.
The Wolf’s Lair
December
1943
Strange Festivities
The way to respect Christmas time
Is not by drinking whisky or wine,
But to sing praises to God on Christmas morn
William McGonagall
Christmas? “Fuckin’ Pissmass!” Patrick spat,
The death of his best brother blaz’d his brain,
He saw him laughin’ in the cracker hat
He’d always win, that tug-of-war’s long reign;
As Christmas cracks,
Pat Sumner felt like shit
Full of fake santa sacks it just wasn’t worth it.
Painful to ever reconcile
Still spaces at the table
Whose faces heap’d up in a pile
Of memories & fable –
An anecdote, a knowing smile,
Then… that folded cable,
Remember’d in the drawer where it stays,
Festivity solemnity did glaze.
Pat hit the slopes of Pendle Hill
On Boxing Day, before
Leave days instil belief & will
To trundle back to war,
Part of the spartan manhood set to slam some guarded shore.
Lancashire
December 26th
1944
Return of Rommel
I have swum too far
out of my depth
and the sun has gone
Robin Robertson
Hitler summons his favourite marshal,
Still could he stir that dusty soldier’s soul,
“This year they must try & cross the channel,
I give you France & the Atlantic Wall…
From Kirkenes
Around the Norman shore,
Down to the Pyrenees, a thousand miles or more.”
As he tours the sea defences,
Twitchy gen’rals round him host,
“Incomplete!” agreed consensus
Shattering Der Fuhrer’s boast,
“We must stop them on the beaches
In one day at the most…
If we do not then this War will be lost!”
His voice grew deep, concern’d & edged with frost.
He waves his Field-Marshal’s baton
Like wanded wizard hand,
Foxish vision sinks one-by-one
Obstacles in the sand,
To rascalise destruction when occasions make demand.
Le Vivier
January
1944
Mumble Words 