(AA) Canto 60: Endgame
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War does not determine who is right – only who is left
Bertrand Russell
Irreversibles
The great Soviet people
In a headlong rush of fiery lava
Will wipe out the Fascist gang!
Nikolai Tikhonov
As doom descends on the impending loss
& guillotines glint oer the Nazi neck,
Von Ribbentrop was shocked to see the boss
Turn’d uncoordinated shamble-wreck;
“Might I but try
To make some sort of peace
With Moscow, I could fly there, meet Stalin…” “Please, cease
Such talk – if I made peace today,
I’d just fight them tomorrow!”
Der Fuhrer’s pall all ashen grey,
A face surfeit with sorrow,
Pacing the banks, thro’ caustic spray,
Where Charon’s raft did row
Life’s fallen souls across the Acheron –
But Hitler, yet, to his Hell had not gone.
There was a knock upon the door,
The young Miss Braun stepp’d in,
Whose love leapt raw, “This septic war
I’m destin’d, still, to win…
Now leave us – wider than the Rhine grew Eva’s pining grin.
The Führerbunker
Mar 19th
1945
Setting Sun
These are dead faces.
Wasps’ nests are not more wanly waxen
wood embers not so greyly ashen
Herbert Read
Eph’meral empire nears obsolescence,
The Towers of Tenshu straddle the sky,
As Tojo arrived for his audience
The pale moon sang a sunset lullaby;
Hurrying thro’
An iron-studded gate,
The evening hours, he knew, drew heavy with their fate.
Out of the southern, darkling sky
Silver Superfortresses,
Like eagles hunting from up high,
Rain’d doom upon the masses,
How many children have to die
‘Til their fury passes;
Tokyo like a paper lantern burns.
Of war’s true horrors the emperor learns.
As they watch’d the flames & flashes
To raging maelstrom fann’d,
Into ashes, stonework crashes
Tojo rais’d fisted hand,
“When sacred nations combat on they’ll heed honour’s demand!”
Mount Karvizawa
March 21st
1945
Crime & Punishment
A little rule, a little sway,
A sunbeam in a winter’s day,
Is all the proud & mighty have
John Dyer
Oer Nuremberg’s desolation total
Lone Fokker soar’d, inside Gestapo men
Separated truths from anecdotal,
Death-sentencing with tiny ticks of pen;
Plane touches down
By Salzburg, then by car,
Men driven to the town where those, those… chancers are!
Out of the Post Office they’d been
Dragg’d with imperfect purpose,
For all of them… well, some… were seen
Opening Wehrmacht packages;
Pocketing soap to keep kids clean
Then rewrapping wrappers…
Some seventeen were sentenc’d there to die…
When chaos reigns the maddest reasons why
Will fate derange, will stroke down mute
Our love of life & law
A whistle toot, as soldier’s shoot,
Good folk fell to the floor
In agonies of dying in these dreg-days of the war.
Eugendorf
Mar 24th
1945
Frightened Cows
A tight and chiming string
that resounds to anything—
a single stroke or evil blow
Ivan Vazov
Faerievolktown twinkles by Toder’s stream,
Some medieval El Dorado
Of handsome gates & cobbl’d streets, a dream
Of happy greetings each alborado;
Who’d ever thought
They’d bomb such an idyll –
Blare sirens! Cellars sought! Rilke grabs his fiddle
For to play a gentle ditty,
Children shuddering each thud
Of Ninth Air Force barbarity,
Murdering, they thought, for good,
Plundering with impunity
& sapping streets of blood,
Then back to base… emerging children ‘wow!’
As thro’ the Marketplatz storms frantic cow
With horrified, unhappy eyes
& burning at the tail,
Where cindersizing dragonflies
Flew thro’ the smoky trail,
When one-by-one, dewonder’d, kindergartens start to wail!
Rothenburg
March 31th
1945
Crossing the Rhine
he left that smell behind
it would barely linger by the time
he reached his destination
Emelihter Kihleng
As roofless, star-mark’d jeep screeches to halt,
Georgie spits out globule of cigar phlegm,
“Boys!” he address’d his American salt,
“Find ’em, fix ’em, fight ’em & finish ’em!
An ounce of sweat
Worth a gallon of blood,
Always audacious, get to grips, give it ’em good!”
As generals love glory true,
The Third Army’s matador,
Instils LUCKY, his plucky crew,
With rampant passion for war,
The Third Army’s matador,
“Advance over, under or through!”
Reaching Remagen’s shore
A rail-bridge claim’d worth more than weight in gold,
Battle’s won by the brave, but Wars the bold.
Patton pauses upon the Rhine,
Perches on pontoon plate,
Arches his spine, piss flows like wine,
Hissing with pent-up hate…
Zips up his fly, claims th’eastern bank to slay the Kaiser-state.
Emmerich
April 2nd
1945
Empirical Regrets
But these paperbacks are crumbling in my hands
seachanged bouquets, each brown page
scribbled on, underlined & memorized
Michael Donaghy
‘Twas always weltmacht oder niedergang,’
Mus’d eminent attorney on the rocks
Above his bombshell mansion, where once sang
His sister princesses, him the princox;
Epiphany!
Dark mirror of mankind
Destroy’d poor Germany that decade he’d spent blind.
As we make our vows of substance
In the moments of defeat,
Let us never let the patterns
Of such diabol repeat,
Heed the laws of ancyent Athens,
Drag tyrants from the street,
Then string these up before them killers turn
Of little kids, burnt futures for the urn.
Tho’ wealthy, jewel-school’d, well-bred,
Just now he’d realiz’d,
& shook his head for all the dead,
Der Fuhrer recogniz’d
Not as his lord & saviour but a toad to be despis’d.
Leipzig
April
1945
White House
In America
The highway runs too fast
For men to feel the ground underneath
Femi Fatoba
The blood of good men stains Okinawa,
The President prepares to share their fate,
Into the air that soothes the state of Georgia
His life’s last breaths wheeze out with gremlin grate;
He coughs, complains
Of headaches terrible,
As mighty spirit drains… & bows & leaves battle.
Being flesh & mind a human
But in stature an oak tree,
Lampadephorian Truman
Homelands his Presidency,
The ultimate American
To rule thee sensibly –
& what a time to take that foremost seat;
The Axis Powers verging on defeat.
A heads-up held behind closed door,
“There’ll be a new weapon
Ready in four months,” sat in awe
(How else would one listen),
“If it saves lives… shortens the war… then say I… yes… go on.”
Washington
April 12th
1945
Death Camp
They turn the water off, so I live without water,
they build walls higher, so I live without treetops,
they paint the windows black, so I live without sunshine
J.S. Baca
If this is life then life should welcome death,
Thousands of abject shapes dull wraithdom tread,
Despair & typhus pungent on the breath,
Grey, ghastly heaps & gutters full of dead;
Bestarv’d of meat,
To stay his certain end,
A priest prepares to eat the dead flesh of his friend.
As one the rough guards up & leave
Just before GI’s arrive,
Whose haunted eyes could ne’er believe
Stick-like rakes are still alive,
All that these green lads could achieve
Was feed those who survive,
Strangurious skeletons; skin stretching
Thin; what moans… what specters… & what retching.
As Anna show’d her slump’d nephew
To Carlton Dillinger,
All blotch’d & blue, “What can you do?”
“Mam, I ain’t no doctor…”
Ludwig spasm’d… died… cried she for all of them together.
Belsen
April 15th
1945
Roaring Bears
Yea, the coneys are scared by the thud of hoofs,
And their white scuts flash at their vanishing heels,
And swallows abandon the hamlet-roofs
Thomas Hardy
With razors grazing in a laser shave,
Thus presentable conquerors making
The Russian army, bolder more than brave,
Roads by roads up to the border snaking
Stunned by those sounds
Flung from the Reitwein spur,
That blows & blasts & pounds the Wehrmacht as they stir
To life, facing the most intense
Bombardment ever meted,
Trench-smashing without shame or sense
Those already defeated
Dog stooges to the recompense,
Precipicic teter’d,
Protectors of a capital, foresworn,
But full of dread, undeadly & forlorn.
But… krieg is krieg & schnapps is schnapps,
& to the end flows free
Those molten saps from golden taps
Plung’d in the Hitler tree,
That dripping with bloodletting drains the best of Germany
Brandenburg
April 16th
1944
Mumble Words 