(AA) Canto 57: Deliberations
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All through history, from the days of the great phalanx of the Roman Legion, the master law of tactics remains unchanged; this Law is that to achieve success you must be superior at the point where you intend to strike the decisive blow
Bernard Montgomery
Desperations
Despair is texture; without it
We should not know how to face
The thing with such certainty
John Silkin
Tho’ shehila stay’d, these breathing corpses,
Dancing attendant to the Kapo’s stick,
Are oft’ selected to please the doctors…
Young Ludwig gains six inches with a brick;
They pass him by,
Clutching a surgeon’s knife,
A joyous, silent sigh… another day of life!
“If you’re content with a little
Enough’s as good as a feast,”
But poor Joseph drops his kettle
& could not digest the yeast,
Gracile bones huckstering brittle,
As flesh bore he the least,
Today the guards would bundle him away…
Ludwig sits down to pray where last he lay.
The rumble of the Russian hosts
Murmurous daily near,
Like phantom ghosts the gibbet posts
& ovens disappear…
When rainbow stars are driven off to march the snowy fear.
Auschwitz
Jan 20th
1945
State of War
Here now the locust leaps, the serpent crawls,
And bindweed Ruin writes, as on the walls
The hand of doom once traced Belshazzar’s fate
Adam Mickiewicz
A man lies maim’d down Downtown, Singapore,
Unable to stand, an opium pipe
His only friend, dulling this endless war,
Dreaming of times before his corp’ral’s stripe;
Meanwhile, elsewhere,
This War affects us all,
Demanding times full share, with problems large & small.
Like the hunger in Alaska
Now the rations have downsiz’d,
While the mind of ‘Manny’ Lasker
Lives no longer, analyz’d,
Only Karma knows, “I’ll ask her
Cry rascals wide despis’d,
If all along this war was meant for lost….
Last bullet spent, last hand grenade now toss’d,
He glances round for something sharp,
Chanc’d on a butcher’s knife;
He duck’d for carp, he pluck’d the harp,
He fuck’d his lovely wife,
& now he rucks with enemies until they took his life.
Frisches Haff
January 25th
1945
A Futile Plea
Look at me, & I look back;
you have eyes, but I have none;
you may speak, but I am speechless
Socrates
Clock running out, work left, the secret police
Boost every effort, hypermotile burst,
Wedging dirt within each petrean crease,
From secret hiding bases unimmers’d
Men crawl into
Custody protective,
Helmuth Von Moltke too, pensively reflective.
Drap’d in her finest furs, Freya
Visited Heinrich Mueller,
Himmler’s heir; they talk’d together,
“I’m afraid we can no longer
His most famous name consider,
But there will be no torture –
& Frauline!” “Yes?” “When all this is over
Do come back to us…” her smile hid terror,
Thro’ sheer heart’s love, the whole world crash’d
About her in a spin,
The Justice dash’d off inky flash’d
Sentences of death, in
That paper pile stew’d noble name, cook’d in a loony bin.
Tegel Prison
January 23rd
1944
Operation Matador
I stumbl’d through no man’s land,
living miracle after miracle,
that I could still hurt, that I still lived
Polly Clark
Thro’ Heaven, Hell & cosmic mystery
One thing’s for certain there are many ways
A man can die – hon’rable dysentry
But one, another drifts like dinner tray
Thro’ mangrove murk
Towards the Japanese,
One button from bezerk, stiff still among the trees
As into Min Chaung’s creek of tides
Innocent infantry files,
Abandon’d by their Burmese guides
Like snipjack tuna – the smiles
Of widening jaws slowly slides,
As loads of crocodiles
Unleash a beastly spinning mince machine –
Hardly a soul surviv’d that sorry scene.
The British took this island mass
But for its reptile realm,
The latest class of pilots pass
Exams, popp’d at the helm,
Of some fresh place the next train of defence to overwhelm
Ramree
January
1945
Landsturm
Woe, woe, unto the fallen city !
Where are thy streets,
Thy towers
Johann Sigurjonsson
Max Stemmler requisition’d by Goebells,
Reich-remnant summon’d to the Prussien,
Oathsworn to resist in bloody battles
The brainwash of the Bolshevik Russian;
His sons were dead,
Them martyrs in his eyes,
Blessing the blood they bled he dons the Jager’s guise.
No rhyme nor reason could explain
The thrall of the Nazi hymns,
Tho’ zest of Hitler’s early reign
Now death’s gory paroxyms,
When loyalty could still ordain
Stepping into chasms…
The GI’s pierce the gloomy atmosphere
With an unanswer’d, “What we doing here?”
Survival’s trivium, of war,
An old man grown full sick,
Thro’ shatter’d door he’d seen before
Torn poster clung to brick,
‘All this we owe to der Fuhrer!’ he laughs all lunatic.
Berlin
February 3rd
1945
Cold War
The stones in Jordan’s stream
Perceived the dove descend
In its lily of light
William Jeffrey
The Big Three meet in reconquer’d Crimea,
Churchill, ailing Roos’veldt & the Georgian,
An august body stately & austere
Discussing this thorny Polish question;
As the Allies,
Grand sharers of the cost,
Inquire thro’ narrow’d eyes, forged friendships freeze & frost.
“Surrender unconditional;
Come fin’ adest revum…”
“Born of order’s calm revival;
Status quo ante bellum…”
Tho’ the bloodlust soon to settle
Still Stalin beat the drum,
“Shoot fifty thousand gen’rals out of hand
To cleanse the devil from the dark Deutschland!”
Churchill gestured with the fury,
Iniquitously rack’d,
“You would kill me ‘fore I’m parley
To such a savage act!”
Such idealistic diff’rences do seldom merge in pact.
Yalta
Feb 13th
1945
Peacemongers
Thus one acquires a taste for disaster
& looks for the daily paper’s headline.
Seeing misfortune’s influential astral
Raymond Queneau
As the head of Air Section, Bletchley Park –
A Jew call’d Jim Rose – phon’d the ministry,
He realised how much kept in the dark
Was his role in murd’rous copartnerie;
Enigma’s gains
Now used to justify
Beeswarms of deadly planes, fraught Furfurs of the sky.
“But Dresden’s baroque & beautiful,
Not a threat to anyone,
Please don’t bomb rococo rubble
As with poor Beethoven’s Bonn!”
Bomber Harris burst his bubble,
“Man, nothing can be done –
We’ll do the city as a transport hub…”
Rose slamm’d down the handset, slink’d thro’ the pub,
Flopp’d in his seat, sipp’d his thick stout,
Then stood up at the bar,
Lungs spurting out unearthly shout,
“How lucky we all are!”
Now slamming doors he runs outside & roars off in his car.
Fenny Stratford
February 12th
1945
Dresden
What wrath of Gods, or wicked influence
Of Starres conspiring wretched men t’afflict
Hath powr’d on earth this noxious pestilence
Edmund Spenser
Squadron Leader Bligh completes his home run,
Now Archie Day so he may fray again,
For if he were once more fell’d from the sun,
The network might he yield at torture’s pain;
Taking control
Of brand new Wellington,
Perform’d he pinpoint roll & join’d the formation.
Skimming the cloudrealm wing-to-wing,
Fokker flights well push’d aside,
The ack-ack air a-shuddering
Brutal bombs fell far & wide,
The noble art of murdering
Efficiently applied…
Streets & churches with bleets of terror fill,
A rare few reach the safety of the hill.
As ghastly Magdeburg suffer’d
Each city shares its hell,
Guiding steel bird, at callous word
Bligh’s load adds to the swell;
Far cry from gallant ’40 these cold slaughters ariel.
Germany
February 13th
1945
Death March
Through these pale cold days
What dark faces burn
Out of three thousand years
Isaac Rosenburg
The stripes are march’d across the killing ground
Men call Eingost, strong shoulder’d Pharisees,
Tough Etta Grunfeld in despairs is drown’d,
Infelicific, fracking on nick knees;
Her Anna gasps
& tries to help, in vain,
“Keep moving!” grey guard rasps & blows out Etta’s brain.
Ragged, skeletal, stagg’ring, train
Lurches yon Yankee bomber,
Hungry as wolves, in constant pain,
As minutes last forever,
Wraiths in the wicked snow & rain
Tragedize together,
As defalcations rake the ill-condemn’d,
Snaking to what could only be their end.
From town-to-town two worlds collide,
Houses of ginger-bread
All warm inside, a mother cried
She’d witness’d children dead:
The Volk, at last, forced to account, truth cacodyllic spread.
Germany
February
1945
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