(AA) Canto 54: Flagellants
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Germany would have become so beautiful, strength through joy, spare time & recreation, new dwellings, the most beautiful cities & villages have been planned, service & just wages, a great, unique health program, social security for the aged & incapacitated. Roads construction & traffic lanes, ports & settlements – how beautiful Germany could have been, if, if, if, & always again, if
Robert Ley
Drop Zones
I’ve stopp’d under a bridge
I haven’t been able to continue
The rain is falling
Miguel James
Superdaring, salted porridge Paras,
From landing parks have disembark’d in troops,
Dark apaches, flashing bows & arrers,
Dash off to catch the scoopiest of scoops;
‘Good morning’s curt,
Their ’saviors’ Dutch embrace,
As with a speedy spurt off to the bridge they race.
A misty day, resistance light,
As bullets pitter-patter
The enemy began to fight,
The streets burn’d black with splatter,
The bridge intact, as in its sight,
Mad as maddest ‘Hatter’
“Woah Mahomet!” on English tongues erupts,
The bridge hard storm’d, secur’d, its sentry huts
Become bold battle bastions,
Now all to do is wait
With loaded guns, ‘til hordes of Huns
Along the bridge shall spate,
A colony of sexton beetles dug in at the gate.
Arnhem
September 17th
1944
Gott Mit Uns
Say not the struggle naught availeth,
The labour & the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not, nor faileth
Arthur Hugh Clough
Model assess’d the day & gladly found
Schutzstaffel legions seasoning nearby,
Harden’d by battle on the Norman pound
& all resolv’d, for Germany, to die;
Convey’d by gusts
Of war, in interims
Kampfwillen readjusts, with lock’d & loaded limbs,
They straf’d & block’d the roads that led
To Arnhem, where, embolded,
They met the foe & shot them dead
As gory fight unfolded,
Some snake-plan sever’d at the head,
Monty’s ‘baby’ scalded,
By boiling pitch, endowsing flame’s flaught flames
Like gladiators in dictators’ games.
They fought as if Bhishma-possess’d
On Kurukshetra’s field,
Breathing their best, needing no rest,
The Irminsul unseal’d,
Defending ancyent tribal tracts with battle-axe & shield.
Holland
September 17th
1944
Best of British
The god of war is drunk with blood
The earth doth faint & fail;
The stench of blood makes sick the heav’ns
William Blake
Hope bash’d her head against the realis’d,
Arnhem, it seems, was just a bridge too far,
A slice of dramaturgy ill devis’d,
The ragged hoo-har of a too high bar;
Facing defeat
For certain, still men fought
In garden, shed & street, spreading their deadly sport.
Since Tewekesbury & Naseby field
The English quite united,
Since Charlie dropp’d the Highland shield
The Scots have too alighted,
A Union, one two thirds seal’d
When the French affrighted
By longbows lethal-streak’d at Agincourt,
What wonders when a Welshman goes to war!
So climb ye Cymric, English, Scot
Three nations, side-by-side,
Form sinew-knotted polyglot,
By glory unified
But not this deed’s alarum, Isandlwanaring the pride.
Arnhem
September 22nd
1944
A Bitter Pill
Before him ran a miserable confusion
Ruin & battle & a grievous end
On struggle, blood & struggle, on terror, dire terror
Gwalchmai Ap Meilyr
Carries on the Para’s constant swinking,
The situation slipping to austere,
The Osterbeek perimeter shrinking
From hope to apprehension, then to fear;
From waxen face
Dumb sockets sit & stare,
Defeat’ll mean disgrace forever, everywhere.
Nine days of Hell, & now they’ve fled
Across the river spuming,
Behind them fifteen hundred dead
& seven thousand fuming
At being caught, among them said
Soldiers, unassuming,
& missing legs, as imprison beckon’d,
“We lost, but at least we finish’’d second!”
They made them at the face of coal,
They made them in the mills;
The long, the tall, the short, the soul
Of Alba’s goat-fill’d hills,
Who fought like caustic demon hounds who’ll slaughter Baskervilles.
Arnhem
September 25th
1944
Death of Rommel
I shall go back
to the formless clouds
& melt myself into rain
Jared Angira
Two automons knock’d on a legend’s door,
Charging their target with highest treason,
But.. for his services throughout the war
Der Fuhrer has permitted him poison;
Serenity
Succumbs his famous wits,
“Speak with your family, but for fifteen minutes!”
He told his wife of his life’s debt,
Embraced his beloved son,
Donn’d old Afrika Korps jacket,
Attach’d Field Marshall’s baton,
She was nobility, & yet
She wept when he was gone,
Away into the forest & his fate,
Car halts, his captors leave the car & wait…
By seat-slump’d star these pale drones stand,
Now Rommel ‘gan to cry,
“Death by the hand of one’s own land
So hard,” stripp’d of all pride,
He wheez’d his last, closed gemmy lids, thought of his wife & died.
Swabia
October 14th
1944
Last Days of the Reich
And this is the crisis-point
The twilight moment between
sleep & waking
Chirstopher Okigbo
Some vale East of the Lakes Masurian
Bleak Prussian homesteads clad in sober grey
Refuse to flee in face of the Russian
Though murder is the order of their day;
Huddl’d in song,
Shells smash through cottage wood
Slaying a peasant throng, soil drinking native blood.
Throughout the Nazi satellites
Roam doubters for eversion,
Bulgaria no longer fights,
The Baltics scream aversion,
Finland leaves Hitler to his plights
As the Romanian
All land & liberty to Stalin yields –
Seizing those vital Ploesti oil-fields.
How darkly disgusting is war
When war’s ways rumble home,
The drumbeats are frightful afar,
The Volk of Berlin’s Rome
Prepare a Way of Spartacus towards the Reichstag dome.
Germany
August
1944
A Change of Tone
This is what you get for begging to be
chosen: every god in the universe eyeing
you through the clouds like a hot wound
Vandana Khanna
As Churchill stood the Commons silent fell,
Sweat, blood & tears in all of them instill’d,
Whose promise of, “One day all will be well…”
Had made them fight despite whom might be kill’d;
With glasses push’d
Up noseridge, he begins
“This war will not be rush’d, but Britain always wins.”
While fighting tyrants & their crimes,
With the Germans fled from Greece,
Let victory attend these times,
People prosper best in peace,
With Hitler slipping in his slimes
Our phantom shall soon cease
To haunt our living days & wailing nights…”
Cheers raced around his face, still shining bright
No longer lonely beaconflame
Of hope in awful night,
But lit the same as all, became
The one burning most bright
Among the luminescence of a land in vital fight.
London
October
1944
The Contract of the Spies
bones in cold spaces
a heap of souls’
robbed glances
Karina Fiorini
Incarceration clouds the count of days,
Mouse morsels of repugnant, filthy food
Like islands that above the swamp do raise
A patch of respite from the marshy mood;
Som unkempt wreck,
Ladder’d stockings tatter’d
Pre-modern Mrs Shrek, Amy’s looks were shatter’d,
As quarter-humans mill’d about
This miserable abyss
The shriek, the scrike, the scream, the shout
Grumbl’d with halitosis
She’d had her toenails rough-torn out
Coughing tuberculosis,
Felt Amy desp’rate denizen of Hell…
Then came the change, one sunday night appell,
“Among thee whom have agents proved…
Yes, you… you… come with me
To be removed, to be re-roov’d
By Hitler’s own decree,
All of your spies shall learn your fates some place in Germany
Fresnes
October
1944
Hungarian Questions
Shut tight your eyes! See nothing at all!
Turn yet paler! And, resigned,
Throw your arms around a greater cross!
Florbela Espanca
Hoffa tries to broker a sep’rate peace,
His rats shall leave the sinking Axis ship,
Hitler’s furies fresh treacheries release,
Sending reserves to reaffirm his grip,
Motor’d across
Pannonia’s wide Plain,
Racing t’avert the loss of all that blood & grain.
At Captain Skorzeny’s command
The auld citadel attack’d,
Thro’ weaking guards his elite band,
Passage pecking schmeissers hack’d,
He strode upright, took Hoffa’s hand,
“Your statement you’ll retract…”
Then gave a speech when all the shooting ends,
“We are not enemies but loyal friends.”
“Hungary fights to the finish!”
Faith restored Zapolyan,
“We have one wish, your Jew rubbish…”
Hoffa leant at Eichmann…
“You must return them all to me for their expurgation!”
Budapest
October
1944
Mumble Words 