(AA) Canto 52: Crush of War
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I long for you from the front
& I will find you when these days of fighting are over
Deep in the homeland
If only I survive
& if the worst happens
If the days of my life are counted
Remember me sometimes
Remember me with a kind word
Konstantin Siminov
Revenge!
Misfortune, I am misfortune,
& my shadow has betrayed me;
Suffering, I am suffering
JM Bognini
To each Departmente spread a secret smile,
Himmler determines one must soon be wiped,
But done, of course, with certain sense of style,
When every detail of those deaths neat-typed;
Choking cordon
Chain’d by Black Shutstaffels –
Village-dwellers summon’d by sick-chime steeple-bells.
Menfolk maliciously murder’d
Beneath a barn’s beam’d arches,
Whose women & offspring herded
Inside the lamb of churches,
Tram trundles twards the massacred
From Limoges slow lurches;
It’s occupants harried ‘cross the convex,
Exits seal’d off, some firebrand burns the hex.
Wylde shrieks leap from a holy place,
As rose the devil’s flame,
What witch-wound trace etch’d in the face
Of those who know no shame,
To them bestial savagery is but a bullish game.
Oradour-sur-Glane
June 10th
1944
The Truth Will Out
Let the hen be clawed; let the lion roar;
Let the foolish be pugnacious;
Let the heart be broken with grief
Llywarch Hen
Hungarian deportings are started,
The estimates well met – like herrings pack’d
& pickl’d in a tin -, all departed
For some camp or other, the whole thing smack’d
Of sheer unease;
With incredible speed
Cleans’d was the “flesh disease” that “never more shall spread;”
Spoiling Semitic minds to doubt
Europa’s soil, the plan is,
“But, better, Palestine, without
The false-sworn Kazakhstanis,”
Sniff secret Zionists about,
Whose visionary plan is
A Greater Israel from Euphrates flow
To Gaza, Antioch & Megiddo.
The BBC & New York Times
On Vrba’s words report
Thro’ conscience climbs undreamt of crimes,
Stretching our psyches taut,
Enpierc’d by fearsome frightfulness, of all life’s comforts fraught!
The Free World
June 12th
1944
Battle of France
Generations after you,
‘Neath the red, the white, the blue,
They shall reap what you have sown
JH Wilson
Life illumes all scenes the Nazis were
The Allies press on to the Sequana;
Stars & Stripes, Union Jack, the Tricolor,
Fluttering for Liberation’s honour;
With shaven pate,
Collaboratrices,
Watch enmity & hatred goug’d in angry faces.
Grand offensive bogs down & gropes
Thro’ the Bocage chequerboard,
Round Kalvarienburg’s red slopes
Deadlock blunts the Saxon sword,
Tho’ outmann’d, outgunn’d, ‘gin the ropes,
From airways slash’d & claw’d,
The Wehrmacht fight with heart so bold & big
As with the master after pass’d Leipzig.
A token force of six Tigers
Met fifty times their size,
What warriors forged in Russia’s
Rough fields of snow & flies,
No matter, tis certaincy they’ll be snuff’d out from the skies.
Villiers Bocage
June 13th
1944
Death in the Jungle
Devoid of desire or music or joy
but lying forever morose
till death takes me unawares
Donnchadh MaRaoiridh
Having swapp’d one prison for another
Slater conducts a bloody one-man war,
Slaughtering patrols, breaking for cover,
As septic sores from weak, white blood cells pour;
His makeshift camp
Sees revenge deliver’d,
Where fixing an old lamp his whole body shiver’d.
He knew that his life was slipping
So thought about his father,
Sweaty rivulets e’er dripping
Til slain by Malaria,
Thro his bloated, blue corpse ripping
Cometh Calliphora…
Attracted by a quiet, scratching sound
Some giant Sloth, three days aft, sniffs around.
She sinks her teeth, the body warm,
Its brittle, black flesh splits,
O see them worm, O feel them squirm,
Awful trove of maggots,
The Sloth coughs up her rotten meat, nose-snorting as she flits.
Thailand
June
1944
Doodlebug
The old strifes are done, the fight is fought.
And with a clang and roll, the new creation
Bursts forth ‘mid tears and blood and tribulation
Sir Lewis Morris
The Nazi grand plan seems less grand than deem’d;
From sites diminish’d by the Allied bomb,
Pilotless ballistics strataward stream’d
To shatter London & her saintly Dom;
The Blitz returns,
Death-tipp’d eagles flying,
Again a city burns, & its fair folk dying.
From heaven-scented Calverly
Caroch’d Air Marshall Dowding,
Gaea’s golden serenity
Burst by th’ear-splitting roaring
Of some Vee-One’s hostility,
Bent on mindless scoring,
It seem’d to laugh & flash above his head,
Towing a spitfire with determin’d tread.
Poised neck & neck, tipp’d wing-to-wing,
Perform’d a graceful tilt,
Curt unhinging… missile spinning
To corn fields at full hilt,
A ruthless killer thwarted, it’s quest’s nemesis well built.
Kent
June 16th
1944
Soviet Advances
Over the garden the moon’s tide tumbles;
Shrubs are shaken by gusts and tremblings;
Pathways ribbon with sudden dissemblings
Marie Under
Hitler has led his Greater Germany
To caddling nightmares of a three-front war,
What strength defends his eastern ‘victory,’
While barest handfuls watch the Norman shore;
From post-to-post
A rigid, nail’d defence;
The Allied bigwigs toast such frigid martial sense.
What courage crumbles for the fight
In the Feste Platze fortresses,
Without water, hope, or daylight,
Led by brainless officers,
Roll’d over by the Russian might,
Leaving pale sepulchres
Of dead & dying, hear their sorry pleas –
A young Thuringen begs on bleeding knees…
…Alas his pity-pleas ignor’d –
Prefers, Konstantin, force;
Who draws his sword, angers outpour’d
Treading the darker course,
From ear-to-ear he calmly ripp’d that throat without remorse.
Byellorussia
June 22nd
1944
Apprehended
So desperately
The leaves cling
To the departing fall
Shiki
Rebel rabbles in the rubble of France
To Berlin’s vengeant passions fall due prey,
Amy Gardner’s unhappy happenstance,
One random turn & road-block blocks the way;
Searching her car
Incriminates were found
Hearing the words , “you are under arrest!” they drown’d
Her in a bath & then revived
Her on the cusp of dying,
All thro’ a week of food depriv’d
They whipp’d her – “you are lying!
Like cormorants constantly dived
Tortures reapplying,
But some transcendent shield defends her core
Toss’d in a fusty cell, blank but the floor
In solitude & darknesses
Design’d her little girls
Pretty dresses, pattern’d tresses
Gave them bobs & curls
With matching fabric ribbons helter-skeltering in curls.
Fresnes
Bombing Budapest
I saw the follies of my former flame,
I turn’d indignant from the hateful sight,
Struck with remorse, and mortified with shame
HJ Pye
As bombs fell on Buda, paper on Pest,
The Admiral sat in his bunker, still
Reflecting on this message from the West –
No longer victim to herr Hitler’s will;
When leaflet read,
How grew, he, full afraid
‘Punish’d they’ll be,’ it said, ‘that deportations aid!’
Three hundred thousand Jews renamed,
But now the trains are halted,
Let Vrba be some saint ordain’d,
Or Sannhedrin exalted,
Thro’ his success in us ingrain’d
Is truth, bitter salted
Tastes it, but we humankind has need to reap
The depths of us, however sick & deep.
As this news to Hitler given,
His need to hold the line,
Relying on rebellion
Repress’d – he mutter’s ‘fine,
Come war what may, we’ll stop those Jews e’er reaching Palestine.”
Berlin
July 9th
1944
Angel of Death
The difficult tolerance of all that is
Mere rigid brute routine; the odd
Sardonic scorn of desolate self-pity
Alun Lewis
Cut by the bleeding edge of academe,
The Hitler-oath outvalueing his health,
Around vile work wild mussitators scream
Warnings unheard; by seizure or by stealth
He pricks & plots
Thro’ pseudosciences,
Hanging raw bibelots from claw’d appliances.
Repugnancies eugenical,
Dissections of chilling zeal,
Fresh eyeballs by the barrowful
Thro’ a cast of thousands wheel,
Experiments nonsensical,
Inhumanoid ordeal,
Labagonies commuted with a tick,
“Off to the chambers with her! Quick! Quick! Quick!”
He starves a newborn baby girl
‘Til a loving mother
Looks on her pearl, brushes soft curl,
Kisses with a smother –
Sufferings unburdening, a murder like no other.
Auschwitz
July
1944
Mumble Words 