(AA) Canto 53: Destructions
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Many people, soldiers & civilians alike, witnessed spectacles comparable with Renaissance painters’ conception of the inferno to which the damn;d were consign;: human beings torn to fragments of flesh & bone; cities blasted into rubble; order’d communities sunder’d into dispers’d human particles
Max Hastings
Bomb Plot
In the walls their windows staring blindly back,
And even the thatch itself was rotted black.
All was ruins, grown old; here death had come crawling
Maksim Bahdanovič
Noblesse oblige, when duty outranks praise,
Stauffenburg slips his oath’s constrictive grip,
Mindful of Mankind’s most valorous days,
He dares to strike at his dictatorship –
Not at the tail,
Aft’ which ye face the bite,
But thro’ the hissing veil the head conjures in fright.
He stepp’d into the conf’rence room,
Hitler glances curt, “Hello!”
The situation maps cry doom…
He placed his briefcase calm & low
Near Hitler’s feet, as sly as fume
This Colonel, quick yet slow,
Takes his leave, when driving thro’ the compound,
He made no flinch as bomb-blast wrenches sound.
Midst the Fuhrerhauptquartier’s
Dull rubble’s wracken rush,
Shredded trousers, shirt in tatters,
Hair tangl’d toilet brush,
“Fate has saved me, I now decree such treachery we crush!”
Wolf’s Lair
July 20th
1944
Betrayals
Anger lay by me all night long,
His breath was hot upon my brow,
He told me of my burning wrong
Elizabeth Daryush
What emotion transforms man to Judas?
Of all heartaches it must be Jealousie;
Constance leads the Gestapo with a hiss
To the old farm own’d by his family;
Watching th’embrace
At an upstairs window,
Taut pulls the jeune-tinged face as lonely torments grow.
The sound of jackboots on the stair
& rough Teutonic clamour
Drove Veronique to clutch Pierre
With full zest of her amour…
The door burst ope, this noble pair
Shied captivity’s floor,
Shooting those shapes daring to enter room,
Pierre leapt on the sly stick grenades …
She groan’d & rose, saw her soul’s mate
Sprawl’d lifeless where he died,
Dusts dissipate, before too late
She tried her suicide…An empty… CLICK… down by her hair ‘Der Bitch!’ is dragg’d outside.
France
July 29th
1944
Revolt
war raged and found profit in colonial lands!
war raged and killed babies in their cradles!
war raged, and destroyed cultural values
Usman Awang
Stalin urges all Polish pride to rise;
Its capital in ruins since its fall –
Emblem of sad defeat, but not demise
For what could break the white-tail’d eagle’s soul;
Fresh hope talk balms,
As Russian tanks draw near,
The citizens take arms, abandoning all fear.
This War’s grey incunabula
Erupted to no avail,
For ruthless, fuel-full Luftwaffe
Dowse belief with lethal hail,
While watching on biovular
Those sister-Slavs derail
The plan; yon the suburbs tanks sat idle;
Stalin, uncompassion’d, at the bridle.
The Nazis reaffirm their grip,
Unleash a savage hate,
This sinking ship, this rubbish tip,
The Poles evacuate,
& shuffle, ragfoot, to the west, cursing their country’s fate.
Warsaw
August
1944
Vengeance!
Impaled on the moon,
a boy’s head is banging for justice.
A mother’s harvest blights at noon
Toyin Adewale-Gabriel
They said in the night all the cats are grey,
Suspicion falls on all but his closest,
The ‘coup’ fizzles to naught by close of day,
Its circle of usurping soul-depress’d;
“Ich bin OK!”
Grateful Volk hear his voice,
“Providence dost display my destiny her choice…”
Financiers of treachery,
Self-made victims of the plot,
Von Stauffenburg dealt with quickly
For defying the despot,
“Long live our sacred Germany!”
Proud-statured as he’s shot,
I wish you could have seen his dying face,
So free of doubt, weightless & full of grace.
Such a sense of shock’d resentment
Spreads thro’ the German world,
Their Fuhrer sent to them unbent
By traitors’ fury hurl’d,
While fires of the Ragnarok a little higher curl’d.
Berlin
August
1944
Libertie
Is it not better to bear Beauty’s weight,
Hold up your arches, solid as rock,
Than to feed the hearths of the world’s hot hate
Laza Kostić
Aux Barricades! With patriotic surge
Frenchmen are bursting from a new Bastille,
Deep gusts of fresh freedom from lungs emerge,
Each swastika torn down in frantic zeal;
A grim return
Hounds collaborators,
Naked, a la lanterne, spat at by beraters.
One gorgeous day in late summer,
Spiedel, Praetor of France,
Shall defy his master’s order
With an innate elegance
Saves the treasures of the Louvre,
As thro’ the streets advance
Those gutsy guns, those GI miracles,
Kiss’d on all sides by smiling mademoiselles.
Two nations born of human light
Illume the great parade,
A supreme sight, a dream delight,
La Marseillaise is played
No time to rest in revely, off to the front they made
Paris
August 26th
1944
Quaesitors
In this crooked dead end of a bitter cold
They keep their fire alive
By burning our songs and poems
Ahmad Shamlou
Into the solemn Prinz-Albrechtstrasse,
Foul heart of an empire within empire,
Crapulent on the banquets of power,
Men to a curv’d brutality aspire;
In dark & daze,
Behold the secret police,
Their diabolic ways rule an imperfect peace.
Thro’ all the doors of Germany
Slime tentacles penetrate,
Each plotter & his family
Shall face a queasitor’s fate,
Footsteps clunking full heavily,
Blood trickles down a grate,
Men broken by a callousness sublime
Reveal the names implicit in the crime.
Tied to a blood-stained wooden rack,
Sorrowful Stulpnafel,
Screams out as crack cuts cross his back,
“No more!” the bull-whip fell,
“Give me a name you filthy hund,” a whisper, “Herr Rommel…”
Berlin
August 29th
1944
Strategy & Tactics
The eagle is king of the birds; among fishes
Leviathan holds the first place,
Cleaving the far, crimson cloud
Sung Yü
Round bed-swapping corridors of power
Hop top-shop gen’rals, Monty’s dropp’d one down,
“But as a sop,” whisper’d Eisenhower
“Adorn his stars with some Fieldmarshall crown”;
“Blame Roanoke”
Fumes Bernard, as he seeks
Audacious masterstroke to end the war in weeks.
“Colonials contemptuous,
Being too pedestrian,
Let us the Siegfried Line bypass,
Paras capture Njimagen
Then Arnhem, there’ll be little fuss
Old men, just, & children,
In that whole sector now protect the Rhine…”
Churchill emits thick smoke, then admits “fine…
Better than each yard a battle…”
“Ike’s unfit to command!”
Unbeatable, unbearable,
They shook each other’s hand,
By contact steel’d, by contract seal’d, by compact concert grand.
Brussels
August 30th
1944
Rousing the Reich
Sampling the possibility of doom
See us searching the papers
Nursing the radio
Shake Keane
“Is Paris burning?” huff’d wistful Hitler,
Fat face so pale & puffy, taut & tense,
A grunt as enters General Molder,
“It can’t go on, this War is lost…” “NONSENSE!”
Chasing rainbows,
A vision is devised,
For deity still flows & soldier mesmerised.
“Tis time to mobilise fully
All of the land’s resources,
From the workers of Germany
Draw Volksgrenadier forces,
Show iron vein til victory
Rides on Asgard’s horses,
Back to the Reich as the Ultramarxist
Breaks ranks with the Ultracapitalist!
Yes, we shall fight upon the Rhine
As did Fred’rick the Great,
No Nineteen Nineteen shall define
The future German state…”
Sighs Molder, “I shall try again…” for that man was his fate.
Wolf’s Lair
August 31st
1944
Operation Market Garden
In church the bell is tolled,
In barracks at the last bugle note
Soldiers like ants file
Stephen Lubega
Night falls on nose-to-tail planes park’d pack’d up
While men they’ll soon convey to blossom sky
Watch ‘Hellzapoppin’, roving pub-to-pub
Singing, “three cheers for the next man to die!”
Then restless sleep
When dawns that day of days
Long sewn, them all shall reap, up leap the Red Berets.
So many Harrys, Dicks & Toms,
Like webbing-spurting spiders
Swell aircraft bellies stripp’d of bombs
Fill shells of smelly gliders
By Horsas haul’d, as intercoms
Rippl’d thro’ the riders;
Hamilcars, Dakotas – so glorious!
Have Heaven fill’d… pass Paras down the bus
Singing songs of ‘Liberation!’
The flocking people trekk’d,
First Eindhoven, then Njimagen,
By orange flags bedeck’d,
But… further north the plan slow’d down by vital bridge’s wreck’d.
Holland
September 17th
1944
Mumble Words 