(AA) Canto 47: Enslavement
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Only the dead have seen the end of war
Plato
Death of Ciano
When partners can’t agree
Their dealings come to naught
And trouble is their labour’s only fruit.
Ivan Andreevich Krylov
See how fluctuating fortunes of war
Can be embodied in a single soul,
A prince addresses emperors no more,
Condemn’d to wallow in this Bourbon hole;
But one more day,
For his strong insistence
On toppling Il Duce earns a curt death sentence…
So… put he a pen to paper,
Converse started to confess
How his idol, & Herr Hitler,
Plung’d this world into their mess…
Smuggl’d out by darling Edda,
Tuck’d in her peasants dress,
The Truth! Salvaged for all posterity,
As enter’d, she, Switzerland, secretly.
He sat with his fellow ‘traitors,’
Before the gangster law,
Those dull soldiers were poor aimers,
(One shot him in the jaw),
& fell he groaning… as he died they’d shot him five times more.
Verona
January 12th
1944
Slave Labour
The sick bay was Heaven itself
An oasis for its inhabitants
In a desert of inhumanity & grief
Maria Joffe
They drew them from the children of Dachau,
Four corners of a suppliant empire,
Mere animals to pull the Nazi plough,
Dragg’d thro a steadily stagnating mire;
Slow work’d to death,
“Such waste to slay early,
Until it’s dying breath it can make you money.”
Thetis spat out a freezing spray,
Soak’d thinning rags on Sergei,
Whispering to himself each day,
“You must survive… do not die!”
Busying round a windswept bay,
Sand sticking in the eye,
Burying scores of deadly little mines
According to Rommel’s murd’rous designs.
How girding was each night to hear
This sweet canary sing,
End drawing near, thro’ death & fear,
Patient & enduring,
“Turn it up Stiltski…” “…World service… the Russians are winning!”
Bolougne-sur-Mer
Jan 15th
1944
Old Fathers
Oh, happy life ! To rove the mountains wild,
The waving woods, or ocean’s heaving breast,
With limbs unfettered, conscience undefiled
Anne Bronte
The darkest hour is that before the dawn,
By Slavophilic internecinum
Along the Valambrossa freight trains blown,
Halting at the sidings of th’abysm;
What ghastly smell,
Foul & nauseating
Ill-welcomes them to Hell… “Line up for delousing…”
They come to where the Grunfeld’s stood
& choose the two old fathers
With Heidi pale, whose thinning blood
That daily weaker courses,
All hugg’d & kiss’d the best they could
Until they kick’d Moses,
Yanking three kinsfolk from good family,
Put on the path to ash-eternity.
Stripping naked, they march to where
A sweet ensemble play’d,
“Why do you stare?” punching the air,
Brick chimney… all hopes fade,
Two brothers face death hand-in-hand, breath poison’d as they pray’d.
Auschwitz
January
1944
Enter the Mustang
So desperately
The leaves cling
To the departing fall
Shiki
Another daylight raid, up went the planes
Messerschmitt & Fockewulf – foes arrive
With yellow tail that effortlessly gains
Upon his finest pilot that survive
Rolls Royce purring
“Mustangs, sir!” “Fuck, look how
Fast they fly, sighs Goering, “Good, god the jigs up now.”
As Reichmarshall with sheepstuck state
Stood gaping up at the skies
As airforce once without compare
Defers to the flinderize,
Too heavy hung them in teh air,
Luftwaffe cut to size,
Whose bitty portions battle-chewe’d, spat out,
All while the raindrop bombs landed about.
He rubs the rouge in from a tin,
& dons Adonis wig,
Clean plucks his chin & summons in
Some prepubescent sprig,
& rapes young screams entwining with the whinings of his pig.
Berlin
January 23rd
1944
Gates of Hell
Poison from syringe in selected snakes
mix and add
In the colours of sighs and many worries
Giambattista Marino
The Spieglemans had gone into hiding
But not their son, by now he would be dead
Troglodytes behind false walls dividing
Refuse bunkers, swap emerald for bread;
Giant black rats
Scuttle as they huddl’d
For heat, instead of chats – kiss’d, caress’d, cuddl’d.
As Death must only be delay’d
However roll days so fair,
One wistful night their plight betray’d
Two hares in a sharing snare,
& now this new kind of afraid
Surrounds them everywhere
Thro’ punches, trucks, thro’ dogs & trains & shouts
Their bodies maul’d, while minds digest all doubt.
Train halts, & high above the gate
‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ did sneer,
A touch as fate would separate
Two soulmates, as appear
Entangibl’d, those tayles, “they’ll kill us all, & now we’re here!”
Auschwitz
January
1944
Nine Hundred Days
I wake. Yes, it’s a coffin lid.-With effort
I reach my hands out and I call
For help. Yes, I recall the tortures
Afanasy Afanasevich Fet
As the Nazis abandon positions
Proud citizens commence their rejoicing,
When only anthropophaginians
Tormented by what future’s dice may bring;
So stoical,
What fervour, phase-by-phase,
Did prove indelible those long nine hundred days.
All the city an allotment,
With not one empty metre,
Surviving all that hatred sent
Their way by mister Hitler,
Blessing the sacred sacrament
Of them & Saint Peter,
For faith can even compensate for food
When love of God lives fulminant imbued.
The guns grew silent as, at last,
To regions in the west
The war hath pass’d, the days newscast
Tho’ joyous, firmly stress’d,
Altho’ they’d won their liberty, ’til victory, no rest.
Leningrad
January 27th
1944
Cooking Pot
every tree a ghost
from the injured root
rising up mute
Sylvia Townsend Warner
Blood bubbles from the beak of bead-eye crow,
Reality worse than our harshest dreams,
All night appels stood in the sneering snow,
Life quite enslaved by what Satanic schemes?
& that vile smell,
Like rubber burning sweet..
At last they hear the bell, when lining up to eat,
With hunger rumbling unallay’d,
For every meal so meagre,
The smell of sawdust breadsticks made
Them salivate, all eager
For spoiling cheese or marmalade;
While the cooks from Riga
Stirr’d the soup, those who knew the strategy
Of where to wait would win more energy;
Those at the front will only taste
The flavour, not the veg
As down it raced, with ladle haste,
The soup made lump & wedge –
But wait too long there’ll be none left, such were the bets they’d hedge.
Auschwitz
February
1944
Monte Cassino
the last wish of heroes fallen at day-break
with a wingless stone in hand
& a thread of anger snaking from their eyes
Jofre Rocha
From white morning mists rose the Ausini,
Weaving his magick Lord Sol clear’d the scene,
Spreading thro the streets of Saint Germani,
The Allies pressed in khaki, beige & green;
Such handsome men
Met that crack mountain troop,
Again! Again! Again! Returning with a stoop.
Altho’ the abbey pleach’d sublime
Above the battle’s terrors,
Centuries shatter’d in short time
By waves of Allied bombers,
This heinous, most heathen crime,
Repeated thrice before…
Those tons of dust thrown up settl’d to show
Monks batter’d, weeping for Gregorio.
They left this bastion of faith
Like rippers leave a whore,
Some ruin’d wraith, stone sunk in Lethe,
Til she will rise once more,
A mass of grey stone sleeping in the trail of Total War.
Italy
Feb 16th
1944
Increasing Resistance
Woe to the one who decries music & war-march,
to mighty heroism inciting hosts;
great pipe that inspires all courage
Gilleasbaig na Ceapaich
Unto his hutch returns the rabbit white,
Churchill, he’s told, has minutes five to spare,
A puff of smok’d cigar, “how was your flight?”
“Shot at til England!” “Please, do take a chair…
Tell me, young man,,
How things could be improv’d…”
“Well, sir, I have a plan… reserve must be remov’d,
For those who risk lives night-on-night
For supplies that never drop,
One saboteur provided right
Complete companies can stop
I promise, sir, my friends will fight,
We’ll keep them on the hop…”
The PM notes those passions as he pleads,
“We will be amiable to your needs;
Halifax, Liberators,
I’ll order forty now,
Some might hate us, but our fate is
To fight them anyhow!”
“Oh, thank-you sir, now tell me, is it Ye-oh or Ye-ow?”
Whitehall
February
1944
Mumble Words 