(AA) Canto 56: The Rage of War
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What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy
Mahatma Gandhi
Poker Game
How did you pass thro’ cobalt wood
Thro’ shrouds of white, to reach the sneer
Where fat hyenas feast on blood
Amjad Nasser
Yuletide passes by & yet no victor;
Saint Nicholas delivers golden gift
To the Allies, the skies gleam clear weather,
Reflected by the bright, white snowsome drift;
Farenheit’s fall,
The GI grows colder,
Shouts, “Fire in the hole!” Angels on his shoulder
Go about their deadly business,
Wreaking murder far below,
Piles of presents sent for Christmas
Lie unopened in the snow,
For nearby these frozen corpses
These gifts will never know
As all about the Fuhrer’s grand design
But a spent promise broken on the line.
All-in for the Fascist menace,
Three aces… world grows hush,
Hitler’s grimace, the other ace
Flipp’d for a royal flush,
The Allies claim the bulging pot, upon three sides now push.
France
December 27th
1944
For Japan!
We didn’t see our dead,
Who rarely bothered coming home to die
But simply stayed away out there
Howard Nemerov
How light the hearts of men summon’d to die,
The time to please the Emperor soon come,
Pride forms blue spinning crystals in the eye,
Serene as the floating chrysanthemum;
From Kyushu
To Soya-Misaki,
Tojo’s warmongers drew their lethal infantry;
Then pour’d them thro’ the harbour quays
Filling the honeycomb caves,
The Kimigayo on the breeze
Superpatriotic braves
Heard strange whisperings in the trees
As mad kannushi raves,
Ambitious lilies adventing the storm,
Not long to go before the war comes home.
Basho climb’d gorgeous Mount Shuri,
Open’d his heart & pray’d
For victory, his great army
Snoozed in the evening shade,
Waiting to be awoken & to draw the Empire’s blade.
Okinawa
January 1st
1945
Death of Frau Stemmler
Within our life these sorrows we contain
Uncertain days, yet full of certain grief;
In number few, yet infinite in pain
Christopher Lever
Karolina gazed on beautiful spires,
Medieval majesty up-streaming,
Untouch’d by this damn’d war’s destructive fires,
The World of old all dazzling & dreaming;
Her cousin Klaus
Meets her at the station,
Soon in a coffehaus flows good conversation.
Bligh flew over Franconia
Where the targets drew in sight,
Dyak temple of Der Fuhrer
One moment before midnight,
From the belly of his bomber
Drops the poor people’s plight…
A grey deluge of terror from the skies,
Frau Stemmler cursed Herr Hitler as she dies.
As ghastly Magdeburg suffer’d
This city too knows hell,
Bligh glides his bird & at the word
Load added to the swell,
A far cry from gallant ‘forty this slaughter ariel.
Nuremburg
Jan 2nd
1945
The Anonymous Soldier
I find no peace, & all my war is done,
I fear & hope, I burn, & freeze like ice.
I fly above the wind, yet can I not arise
Sir Thomas Wyatt
In a storm, in a blizzardsong of snow,
A soldier huddles from a distant land,
Where purple sands of desert heave & blow,
& nomads drink the vines of Samarkand;
This frozen waste,
This landscape alien,
Encas’d the great displac’d races of gravesent men.
They knew him thro’ the regiment,
Tho’ none his name remember’d,
A shell, of elevation spent,
Beside his neck descended,
& blew up like a lava vent,
Cruelly dismember’d
His torso stood upon two bleeding knees,
Legs in the bushes, arms up in the trees.
Once he was his mother’s darling,
But now he’s blown to bits
Cursing the King of Everything,
The Devil’s glamourglitz,
Lock’d in wars of Good & Evil, when Destiny permits.
Russia
January
1945
Coffee & Cigars
In a Wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die
Lewis Carroll
As France was swept with sunshine breaking forth
From Winter’s night with all the joy of dawn,
Redoubtable Pendragon of the North –
To some archangel, other’s demonspawn -,
By armour’d train
Crept to the rendezvous
With Monty, ever vain, but still his best, he knew.
They met for coffee & cigars
Churchill insisted puffing,
“It seems the mighty roar of Mars
Reduced to hoarsey huffing,
The Battle of the Bulge’s scars,
& his army’s roughing,
Has chasten’d Eisenhower…” Monty smil’d,
“He gets our strength is unity concil’d,
We’ve come a long way haven’t we?”
The both of them agreed,
By air & sea & land did free
The banded British breed
Spun on a moral sixpence from packhorse to plated steel.
Brussels
January 5th
1944
Karmic Echoes
O mother!
Weep for thy noble dead;
They fought like heroes till they fell
James Nicol
Zhukov emits the order of the day –
Pamphlets, loudspeakers, all along the line
Remember those who fell along the way -,
‘On those who did us torture let divine
Retribution
Seek them with no pity…’
Mouths full of ablutions, prickspur lethality
In fatal blows did close, embroil
The Wehrmacht with disaster;
HER sandal-foot steps onto soil,
The scales of fate HER master,
Watching a single soldier toil
As the Russians pass’d her –
Surrounding some German in their net,
Surrendering at point of bayonet.
In Shlisselburg he’d shar’d stare-eyes,
“Just shoot him!” “No, stop, no!,”
A Russian cries, “tho’ you despise
Him I must let him go!”
“But why?” “I cannot quite explain…” smiles KARMA in the snow.
January 6th
Szolnok
1945
Defeating the Wehrmacht
‘Tis true, ’tis day; what though it be?
O wilt thou therefore rise from me?
Why should we rise, because ’tis light?
John Donne
Men shuffled thro’ the snow with frozen feet,
Beshawl’d as hags, thick whiskers wire & grey,
The gamble fail’d, an army in retreat,
Avoiding another bloody Cannae;
As in the East,
To the cruel Katyusha,
Hordes of Russkis releas’d across the Vistula.
It was less offensive action,
More the milt’ry parade,
As Berlinwards marches Russian
With the Saragozan maid,
Narr’eyed avengers talion
Primal instinct obey’d,
Zhukov commands the Mazovian plain,
The Wolf’s Lair now diminish’d of Wolfsbane.
With freedom of the world at stake,
With Wolves of war abroad,
Riding the Snake the Russians take
The Moscow-Berlin road,
Racing on hated enemies to put them to the sword.
Warsaw
Jan 12th
1945
New Normal
What is’t to toil amidst the din of war,
To talk of honour, or a dreadful fear,
To live on hope, the shadow’d best we have
Joseph Badworth
A rumbling drone, reminiscent of Hell
Grows louder when the front lines sag & crack,
Posnaniensis desolately dwell
Where roads of Reich & progress cul-de-sac;
Shop windows all
Display fray’d cardboard goods
While on the farmer’s stall just sickly looking spuds.
The solitary cafe sold
Ersatz unpalatable
The only cinema did hold
Heimatfilms sentimental
This last one now some three months old
But life had grown so dull
That still to these unheated seats they drift
To watch again with friends when ends the shift.
As one departs the populace –
By handcart, horse & hand
Pans, mattresses, sacks, suitcases
Plod in a gypsy band,
Sie gaben ihr leben for Fuhrer, Volk & Vaterland
Posen
17th January
1945
Bastards
We are very slightly changed
From the semi-apes who ranged
India’s prehistoric clay
Rudyard Kipling
This War’s final dramas know no pity,
Satanical eupraxia all sides,
Effluviums of mass’d virility
Swarms from the east to sieze its nightly brides;
Libidos thrust
On peach-ripe alabasters
Eyes like spring skies ’til lust claws girls to their ‘masters.’
Thro’ cellars, barns, the came in queues,
Deflower’d ev’ry petal,
Stenching of cigarettes & booze –
Under each boiling kettle
This harrowing from hell renews,
When the harsh pains settle
Some bled to death, some hang themselves from trees,
Some sang a heimatlider on raw knees.
& some shall bear a bastard child,
Eyes so slightly slanted,
One mother styl’d her night defil’d
That her boy implanted –
Her little miracle of that lifetime’s wish Godgranted.
Wartheland
January
1944
Mumble Words 