Axis & Allies
(AA) Canto 36: Steadfastnesses
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The most persistent sound which reverberates through man’s history is the beating of war drums
Arthur Koestler
Prisoners
I carried the false spirit force of sadness
wrapped in a brown sack in the pocket
of a worn, tweed coat
Adrian C. Louis
Humiliated by subhuman skill
The master race enacts its casting vote,
Feeling unsatisfied with a quick kill
They choose instead constriction by the throat;
So drag their prey
To Korolenko Street,
“Lets make them rue the day they damn’d us in defeat!”
Kuzmenko is the first to cry
Bull-clubb’d to the ground & shot,
Around Klimenko nail-fists fly,
Til left by bullets to rot,
Shouting, “Red sport will never die!”
Trusevich marks his spot,
Stood proud & tall in his goalkeeper green,
Soon blood-stain’d in the Babi-Yar ravine.
The news filter’d to the outside,
Dishearten’d Konstantin,
Deflated pride went to confide
With mother in an inn,
“Worry not,” opin’d Christina , “The final we must win.”
Kiev
September
1942
Operation Watchtower
Nay, I protest, though Death with his
Worst Counsel should divide us here,
His terrors could not make me fear
Lord Herbert of Cherbury
America, at last, enters battle,
Aslant volcanic isle rainforested,
Strange & stagnant, humid, pestilential,
By lizards & swarm’d insects infested;
When bugles blare,
Comes forth the fierce attack,
Banzais scything thro air silenced by CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!
Men throttl’d with furious rage
Midst the giant hardwood trees,
Mottl’d by squawking foliage,
Warm swamp-waters tickling knees,
Where, fell’d by Wars that others wage,
Full riddl’d with disease’
The last thing many marines would have seen
Were piercing chrystals’ fanatical glean!
Up, up went Nippon’s battlecry
Along the Bloody Ridge,
“Banzai!” “Banzai!” “Maline you die!”
Six hard days of carnage,
But like brave Barnes at Gettysburg defenders would not budge.
Guadalcanal
September 14th
1942
Urban Crucible
It isn’t me, someone else is suffering. I couldn’t.
Not like this. Everything that has happened,
Cover it with a black cloth
Anna Akhmatova
Paulus puts down the phone on der Fuhrer,
Flame-eyed gen’rals await its decision,
“Incontent for us to reach the Volga,
Each brick of this damn’d city must be won!”
With cautious voice
He order’d the advance,
Restricted of all choice, condemn’d to court with chance.
Immazed the Drang Nach Osten’s flow
All in the armpit carcass,
This hellish huge, grey grain silo,
Held by ragged defenders,
Dread lingers in the vast shadow,
Wylde shots blast at noises –
Where rages vicious hand-to-hand combat
In sewer, stairwell, cellar, shop-front, flat.
Pity the poor civilian,
Courageous troglodyte,
An alien subt’ranean
Defending its birthright,
This is its city, its property, its striving, its fight.
Stalingrad
September 19th
1942
Arctic Circle
It is fitting to mourn dead sailors,
To crown the sea with some wild wreath of foam
On some steep promontory
Vernon Watkins
The ice-encrusted look-out grew entranced,
Burnley’s ain blinking hyperborean,
A glowing polar coast capp’d the distance,
Snow-realms of Thule’s half-light Cimmerian;
Ship’s shadows plough’d
Northwards with proper care,
Rolling, pitching thro’ cloud, spray freezing in the air.
Jack Sumner shouts, day-in, day-out,
His convoy runs the gauntlet,
Batter’d & scatter’d by the kraut,
With many a sinking threat,
But well the British gunners fought,
Bursting the minefield net,
To be spotted by their Russian raven,
Who’d escort them safely to this haven.
They’d enter the ghostly harbour,
Discharge their martial bread,
Helping Russia hack down Hitler
In terrible bloodshed,
Then drown’d their thin-fray’d nerves with vodka in a drinking shed.
Archangel
September
1942
Crux
In the ruins a small light flickers,
there is someone alive there,
a fire clenched between his teeth
Iunna Morits
The Kremlin’s air grew heavy with the fate
Of the Russian empire & Stalin’s fame
S’tho standing at the Corinthian gate,
“We must save the city, she bares my name…
Not one step back!”
The motherland’s last hope
Shall beat back the attack, some Sumo at the rope.
Many a penal battalion
Ythrust into the battle,
Trapt twixt a foreign machine gun
& the Kommissar’s pistol,
How they charged in desperation,
Miracle survival…
Getting to grips as quickly as they could
Ev’ry second shedding Soviet blood.
The lucky few punctured the lines,
Cold steel coldly applied,
The siren whines, th’assault resigns
& when the blood had dried
One hundred Ruskis slept breathless but ten schweinhunds had died…
Stalingrad
October
1942
Innocent Blood
The Sun of Justice may withdraw his beams
Awhile from earthly ken, & sit conceal’d
In dark recess pavilioned round with clouds
George Bally
Kim was a slave! dragg’d from deep Korea
With countrymen he’d never met before,
Control’d by rifle butts, insults & fear,
Compell’d to help his masters with their war;
His island’s thrall
Another planet seem’d,
“Goddamn it!” Sergeant Hall, dreaming in the sunbeams,
“This place is hot!” “Sir, over there!”
“What?” “Asian looking fella…”
“Well shoot him then!” “But he don’t wear
No uniform?” “Private Mellor,
What clothes they wearin’ I don’t care,
S’long as he looks yella,
We’ll kill him ‘til this hell-hole’s neutraliz’d!”
The servant to the situation siz’d,
This galling deed has to be done
& rais’d an aim at Kim,
“I’m sorry son…” from shaking gun
A bullet rak’d thro’ him,
Dismantl’d from Humanity thro’ vanity & whim.
Guadalcanal
October
1942
Sand Lines
If you tear down the web I said
It will simply know
This isn’t a place to call home
Fady Joudah
Empire’s chains broken by the outlawry,
Exquisite lamps of freedom bars unbolt
From Taranaki to Tobermory…
But yet dig-in lads round some railway hut;
El Alamein
Hosts see-saw battles tense,
The weak-link of a chain or brinkflop subsequence.
As heavenforth the barrage spews
The flames of red of horizons
Cacophonies of carnage chews
The shells from a thousand guns
Announcing thats the Reich renews
Conquest with its weapons,
Whose panzers into power motion crank,
Whose drivers steer’d ivory-tower’d tank
Ears full of voices, wading thro,’
The voids of battletide,
When War’s just you, your tiny crew
& slitting lightshow slide,
When color in the sunlight rushes film-flash by outside.
October
Egypt
1942
American Achilles
The march gone by was glorious, this shall be
More glorious still. To one & all of ye
I speak.- Remember well what is done
JD Horrocks
Before three thousand Sendai Japanese
John Basilone led only two sections
Peppering machine gun posts thro’ the trees
Off-fending, with brutal vivisections;
Howls, rants & screams
In-hemming every side
While bullets flew in streams the bloodrops never dried.
Three days of neverstop attacks,
While rapid dwindle rations,
John dropping ninjas on their backs,
&, after the assassins,
Day dons, three nights, it’s jacket blacks,
Starsplash buttons fastens,
‘Til at the end him left with just two boys,
Face nothing but the hum of jungle noise.
For this is how a hero looks,
Cover them in glory,
Etch in thy books when at the crux,
Perilous & gory,
They fought by immortality writing down their story.
Henderson Field
October 25th
1942
Operation Supercharge
They were our comrades
Crowned with their youth;
See what they gave!
Tancred Agius
As dogged as at La Haye Saint they fought,
With sullen eyes fix’d on the blasted earth
For sudden shapes & shadows, target sought
Then caught them with a ‘fucking army’s worth;’
Six panzers cast
Amang the hummocks soft
Deliver dumb disaster while the caps were doff’d
To Monty in his element
Whose murd’rous mechanisms
Shall masticate all Germans sent
Sculpt waxwork paroxysms
E’er witherwards the Wehrmacht senr
Follows fatalisms
Shredded bodies burnt & mutilated,
But no! Death’s scythe’s not yet satiated.
“Napoleon once rode thro’ here!”
The shrinking sergeant said,
Whose single tear sprain crystal clear
Then on the sands was shed,
“This land is only bred for death…” bled out & join’d the dead.
Elaqqaqir
Nov 1
1942
(AA) Gl’Immortali IV
These things, then, the Muses sang who dwell on Olympus, nine daughters begotten by great Zeus, Cleio and Euterpe, Thaleia, Melpomene and Terpsichore, and Erato and Polyhymnia and Urania and Calliope, who is the chiefest of them all, for she attends on worshipful princes
Hesiod
Immortal Embassy
The lights of heaven are shut in pitchy clouds
And flakes of fire run tilting through the sky
Like dim ostents to some great tragedy
Thomas of Woodstock
To the lofty shock of the golden guard,
Mephistophilis appear’d at Bifrost,
“You may,” says Heimdall, “pass into Asgard…”
Where, after splendid Ithavol was cross’d,
Welcom’d abroad
Was Satan’s embassy,
Splendid-scented abode plays host to victory!
Old Odin drank into night,
Quaffing barrels of beer
Toasting the highlights of the fight
With the Cockrelle musketeer,
As all at once the air grew tight
The Daemon drools a sneer;
“Aesir, I bring an offer from my lord
Together let’s put Pyerun to the sword!”
Sits there, Odin, undecided,
To drag the wars on more,
“Sire, be counted,” Loki whisper’d,
“& settle an old score,”
In silence sinks the One-Eyed One, then smiles, then nods at Thor.
Valhalla
Promise of Jove
My God! I will address Thee
In loudest hymns of praise;
Then, too, my soul shall bless Thee
Synyesius
Gods gathering around Ignatius
Pray with the Saint upon the Bark & Cope,
While solem psalms sung by Quirinius
Seem as if pew’d in Saint Pauls near the Pope;
“Where art thou Jove?”
The congregation yearns,
Melodious they strove as every hymn-note burns.
“Who lives in love loves least to live
& a long delay dost rue,
If Him we loved will us forgive,
Him to whom all praise is due,
Then evil from our souls shall sieve
& give those souls to You –
Come show the world your spirit, still, is strong!”
Disturbs, Archangel Gabriel, this song…
“As God made man by image seen
So share, the Gods, men’s faults,
& if was seen, by movie screen,
The narcissistic schmaltz
Of Hitler, Jove would crackle anger flung as lightning bolts!
Earth
Evil Empire
A terrible change is come: I see a cloud
Brooding over the valley like the wing
Of a destroying angel dark & dread
CL Reddell
Midgard play’d host to the Leviathan;
As Hydra Demagorgons held the land,
From ocean trench surfaces the Kraken,
It’s tentacles encreeping under sand;
To stand apart,
Sucking the islands dry
Of harvest, hope & heart, while watchful Wyvrns fly.
Satanus call’d a grand counsel
To discuss the growing war,
Along the high road into Hell
Rode the company of Thor,
Announced by the doom-peeling bell,
Led thro th’ivory door,
Presented ‘fore the princely throne of bone,
“All Asia guarded by Pyerun alone.”
“We will be strong Lord Lucifer
& compensate thy flanks…”
Lone warrior in black armour
Strode clanking thro’ the ranks,
“My name is Barbarossa, for this battle offer thanks.”
Pandemonium
Babababgorath
I see beyond all words his future shape,
Its feet upon the carcass of the ape
& round its mighty head, prophetic birds
Thomas Blackburn
Updripping from the scum of Avernus
The Proud Aspirer seems a giant ram
O wrath-swollen dragon of Satanus
Lurching to feast upon the holy Lamb;
Such flaggy wings
Stretch from his brazen back
While innum’rable things hiss thro a fissure crack.
The Worm unfurls his scaly tail,
His monstrous body rumbles,
Wings flapping as a mainyard sail,
While stinking sulphur grumbles –
Steaming from teeth stain’d gobbet stale –
Out some sinner tumbles,
Screaming in desperation at his crimes
A frail endtimer at the end of times.
To battle goes the Lizard King
Across Vesuvo’s waste,
Now half-footing, now half-flying,
To Heaven in his haste,
The hordes of Hell behind him in the glow of hate encased.
Ausonia
Love’s Hope
The hot desires burn low, and wan
Those ashy fires, that flamed anon.
The stars have twinkled, and gone out
John Galsworthy
A river courses thro’ a horseful plain,
Carriageing one golden strand of Venus,
On its fibres a precious, faint bloodstain,
Ingraining the best of her essences;
Europa’s shore
Watches Thetis make play,
Where peasant waters pour into a crescent bay.
As Merman scouts the outer seas,
He spies a velvety thread,
Escorts it thro’ the coral trees
To where old Dagon rested,
& plants it on the snoring wheeze
Of Neptune, bare-chested,
It-locking in an airy, lucid dome,
Now blown off spinning thro’ the under-foam.
Hair lands inside an oyster shell,
Jaws quiver as they close,
Ambrosial mother of pearl,
As soft as spring time snows,
Hushes her magic as the fibre to a wylde rose grows.
Oceania
Barbarossa Dawn
Now stoops the sun, & dies day’s cheerful light.
When stars tread forth, intone this two-tongued folk,
Standing with firebrands, hymns of sacrifice
CM Doughty
Satanus advances slowly for Heaven
The Gods, like scuttling rats, flee from his feet
Jove’s treachery never once forgotten
As thrust-by-thrust his vengeances did meet;
By black-cloth sun
Moons flew in blood red hide,
All was devastation, & deadly deicide.
At the point of concentration
Hells black legions forced to wait
Til upon the south orison
Camst the Aesir one month late
Says Odin my humblest pardon
But we were tricked by fate
To battle do with Pyerun’s minions
Amidst the Transylvanian mountains
But we are come now Lucifer
To compensate thy flanks
Lone warrior in black armour
Strode clanking thro the ranks
His name is Barbarossa for this battle gives you thanks
Europa
Murder Momentous
in the voice of the wind
in the surge of the sea
in the Aspect & the Being
Antonio Jacinto
Three Rainbow Wyvrn, sleekly serpentine,
Hear the entrancing chords of the Shinto,
Summon’d to Fujiyama’s sacred shrine
Where waited Bishamon, coal eyes aglow;
Astride the back
Of rare, mystical steed…
He orders an attack, over the seas they speed…
At the heart of a silver sea
They came on a volcano
Slumbering in tranquillity
Was the eagle of Hino,
They fell on him in wylde fury,
Bird whimpers as they go…
Three days later spotted by Gabriel,
Stripp’d of plumage, voice tringing madrigal…
Neon-swath’d towers scrape the sky
Beneath the spangl’d stars
Hino’s heart’s cry, Sam’s soulful sigh
Swept from a throne of cars,
“The time has come for battle & a war to end all wars!”
Americana
A Season in Hell
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Balrog, chief cause & culprit of these rhymes,
Tours the seven circles of Satanus,
Meph’ found him with the broken-hearted crimes,
“Our lord bids thee return to Cocytus!”
With hugeous urge
Of his wing gigantic,
Hades sways to the surge rippling forth concentric.
Roaming over dismember’d souls
Astrew the fiery cavern,
Yon Caina, Judeccan falls,
Lands by the Anti-Heaven,
Striding along skeletal halls
Toward the cloven one –
The pair well met, aft converse serpentine
They saunter thro’ dungeons incarnadine,
Where imps collect the crimson goo,
Long in labours wheeling,
When these first few drops from the Jew
Weepeth from the ceiling,
Ghouls sing Carmen Cruenta to the crude Doom Bell’s peeling.
Pandemonium
Holy Waters
The sea shall seethe like boiling casserole,
Change colors, taking on unnatural form,
Showing its ill will at full blast to all
Ausiàs March
Uncle Sam sat enthroned with Liberty
Upon the voyage East to Albion,
Entertain’d elegantly pleasantly
By his royal emissary, Dagon;
Relaxed, despite
The stern vein of that day,
How soon the deadly fight, how soon the frightful fray?
Little did those deities know
That out of the stagnant Styx,
A fleet of foul Sea-Devils flow,
So vicious in vilesome mix,
The brave Mermen could only slow
The foe with eye-glow fixt
Upon a shimmering, sun-brush’d surface,
Up to that barge they roar in dorkish race!
Neptune appears & checks progress
With trident, crown & shield,
Grim devils press their gruesomeness,
But Gods will rarely yield,
Soon corpses float about him in a liquid battlefield.
Oceania
(AA) Canto 37: Titans
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It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it
Robert E. Lee
Stretching Point
God of our fathers, what is man!
That thou towards him with hand so various…
Temper’st thy providence through his short cause
John Milton
Monty’s patience has come to juicy fruit
A well-nourish’d plum swelling on the stem
That fully pluck’d attacking follows suit,
“Kill the Germans wherever you find them!”
None to the wise,
Der Fuhrer’s fav’rite son
Receives his precious prize, the field marshal’s baton!
News breaks, by condor scurries back,
His beleaguer’d Afrikans
Batter’d, attack after attack
Bombards the Devils Gardens,
Thro’ hard-hack’d gaps the British stack,
Th’impervious shermans –
Days & nights & days the tussle flosses,
But Hitler can’t replace Rommel’s losses.
Dam bursts about his last panzers,
Oil starving in the sand,
No more chances, backwards glances
Gazed hopeful for Deutschland –
Such things we ordinary mortals hardly understand.
Egypt
November 2nd
1942
Secret Landing
March to the battle-field,
The foe is now before us ;
Each heart is freedom’s shield
B.E. O’Meara
Tho’ well & good, youth craves not life’s dull calm
In lone felucca, oozing sardine stench
Went Aimee Gardner, Odette from the farms
Of Quimper, now, returns to help the French
Get rid of those
Who dare to act a king
Where Liberty still grows, tho’ with a broken wing
They slipp’d into a silent bay
Splintering Riviera
Into a dinghy heav’d their way
Francois, Hugh, Jack & Sarah
With Aimee, who, in her own way
Never look’d so fairer
The crimson of adventure in her veins
Upon the rising tide she beach obtains
Whose fresh, soft footsteps sunk in sand
Faded, wash’d by waters,
Rushing to land, band after band
Of white surf, her daughters
Forgotten both, thoughts focus’d all on what our train’s taught us…
Cote D’Azore
Nov 2nd
1942
El Alamein
When the bullets came in a hail,
bubbling up in the bare sand,
he remembered Inverkeithing
Sorley Maclean
Stiff-borne by dreams from his fade-worn Fuhrer,
Fraught by an all-expectant Germany,
Ill on the air of the lion-pelt Delta,
The Pyramids in immediacy;
Rommel orders
His neurasthenic men,
“Boys, rev up the panzers, advance them once again.”
Droving North of the Quattara,
These iron-clad caravans
Rode the ridge Alem el Halfa
To the Somuan Shermans,
Hanging tough – from shabby shelter
Shells titubated plans;
He paus’d, the pale moon growing paler still,
Up from the south warm sandstorms shriek & shrill.
Dust settles on a dead terrain,
Enmein’d with armour’d hulk,
Glancing in pain, long lists of slain,
“A tanker has been sunk…”
He took the news heart-sighing, “Call it off!” & left to sulk.
Jabel Kalakh
November 3rd
1942
Into Action
When or where did the ancient world, or ours,
Ever see such lively, ever feel such pure
Light coming out of dark ink
Giambattista Marino
Old masters torn from walls, from old chateaux
To humble huts, invisible hatred
Awaits the reawakening, a cause
Not unforesaken, Amy breaks the bread;
A jug of wine
Sunlight clips the table,
“How are you!” “I’m quite fine…” “My name’s Peter Churchill,”
But here I’m Gaston…” ‘quite pretty,’
Thought he, as she smooth’d lipstick
Oer kissable lips, chemistry
Tingles both… “Listen, the trick
Is act with naturality,”
He gave his fringe a flick,
“From one’s common occurrences transcend,
On tiny details many lives depend.”
The vassal farce of Vichy France
Dissolves that very day
All sides advance in arrogance
The dirty Wehrmacht grey,
“Things might turn out tad tougher now…” smil’d Peter, “you don’t say.”
Cannes
Nov 11th
1943
Problem Solvers
The worst kind of infortune is this, –
A man that hath been in prosperitie,
And it remember whan it passed is
Geoffrey Chaucer
Sinking neath the weight of this fresh burden,
Fork pois’d, flicking thro this fatal cable,
Sate Hitler, that staunch vegetarian,
No vulgar corpse ever graced his table;
He starts to shake,
Meal squashes to the floor
With footsteps in a quake stamps shrieking more & more.
“Get me Von Paulus on the phone!”
“Fuhrer, we are surrounded!”
“You must stay in that battlezone,
DO NOT BREAK OUT!” astounded,
That Field-Marshall despairs did moan
As his heart’s hopes flounder’d,
“But tell me how my men shall be supplied?”
“By flights of Luftwaffe,” Goering replied.
“Then that is settl’d,” Hitler spake,
Trusting his winner’s sense,
“It’s make or break, don’t fudge or flake,
Conducting the defence,
Move in & hold the city, a relief I’ll send thee hence.”
Wolf’s Lair
November 22nd
1942
Breaking Point
The great Soviet people in a headlong rush
of fiery lave will wipe out the fascist gang.
Wipe them out ! And leave no traces
Boris Shmidt
The River Don, held by Romanians,
Precious protectors of supply’s long lines,
Whose ranks beef’d up by brash Hungarians,
Content to keep out cold with warming wines
& cups of schnapps…
As falls the snowy chrome,
Thoughts frozen under caps, still paintings of a home.
Blustering blizzards start the day
As over the ice floes pitch
Arm’d Russians & their countersway
Twyx stark Serafimovic
& Kletskaya’s russet clay,
Above each Donside ditch
Soldiers appear in an avenging surge
Those silhouetted angels on the verge.
Like gas explosion from a mine
These modern Cossacks spread
Their bulging lines of battle, pine
Fresh widows for the dead
In Bucharest & Budapest, on corpses crows well fed.
Eurasia
November 19th
1942
Nuclear Advent
Marble walls of palaces,
Iron bars of dungeons,
You break through them all
Alter Esselin
Einstein has warn’d Rooseveldt directly,
“The unspeakable fury of the Bomb,”
A project given top priority,
Harnessing the power of the atom;
“No better man
Our vision to protect
Let Oppenheimer man the Manhattan Project.”
He led them to Los Alamos
Transfiguring the future
Fastidious, the uberboss
Of this nuclear sutra
Up flicks a coin upon a toss,
Chancing fate as Teucer
Led from Crete his fleet of Proto-Trojans
Despis’d, denied, by the theologians.
The coin spins upwards on a rise,
Tis simple heads or tails,
To dream, devise, actualise,
Harness the murd’rous gales
Even, perhaps, oblivion if calculation fails.
Chicago
November
1942
Perversions
Who breathe only when allowed
Who talk only when allowed
Who rest only when allowed
Elizabeth L. A. Kamara
Three schweinerei with nothing else to do
Kidnap three sisters skipping down the street
Dresses rip-torn at Gestapo HQ,
Cesspool where evils deeds & demons meet;
The time & place
Recall as World War Two,
Whose bastard Master Race like madness prosper’d thro.
Naked but for his boots & cap,
The Obersturmbannfuhrer
Slams down her strugglings on his lap,
& down her throat pour’d vodka,
Heard all the while the SLAP-SLAP-SLAP
Of thighs, youngest sister
Weeping as she was raped, while the older
Fending off every fondle, grows bolder
To kick & scratch, she bit & claw’d,
Like kitten’d alleycat,
By gunbutt floor’d, the law restor’d
“We’ll have no more of that,”
The Obersturmbannfuhrer hiss’d while spinning off his hat.
Brussels
November
1942
Counter Attack!
I am not strong, no soldier, no hero,
but if I look back, behind me is 1942,
behind me Stalingrad.
Galina Nikolaeva
How brutal when two granite wills collide,
Men kick’d to death defending an ideal,
The Red Army has trawl’d the nation wide
For fodder to feed into Hades’ wheel;
Adolf Hitler
Remains, tho’ devil’s kin,
Pettiest dictator in the times of Stalin.
As winter gales pile up the snow
Still struggle on the soldiers,
Half-frozen far below zero –
Von Paulus, thro’ field-glasses,
Views flares; a sent up, signal glow,
By vital rescuers –
“Achtung!” across the Wehrmacht’s flimsy flanks –
Roar lethal rows, lextalionic tanks!
As PANIC acquires grave station
Spreading her pungent breeze –
Chain reaction, six-months gains gone,
World-conqueror far flees,
But for the Sixth, that wounded Knight, trapp’d on its bleeding knees.
Stalingrad
December 22nd
1942
(AA) Canto 38: Evelations
**************************************
Ambition, when the pinnacle is gained
With many a toilsome step, the power is sought
Wants to support itself, & sighs to find
The envied height but aggravates the fall
George Bally
Maltese Falcon
Long the night, boisterous is the sea-shore;
Usual a tumult in a congregation;
The vicious will not agree with the good
Lywarch Hen
From nettle-danger flowers safely drawn,
With Monty on the roads to Tripoli
The Maltese felt them less & less alone
As day-by-day was nearing victory;
Valiant light
Brave Malta saved the world
When Hitler’s evil might was at Valetta hurl’d.
That once more yearn’d their homes to raze,
In an action of sheer spite
The heavens, for eleven days,
Full of sound & fire-sprite,
When spitfire its design displays
Lord of the azure height,
So many Axis pilots by them slain,
They never would return in force again.
With winter comes increas’d rations,
& mail from overseas,
Latest fashions, famous passions
Sets people at their ease,
Small semblance of normality & sweet-fill’d christmas trees.
Malta
December 25th
1942
Nippon Noon
into plain rubbish
they begin to turn –
fallen blossoms
Tsuji Momoko
Sanguine waters surround the Solomons,
The Sun of Empire starts her long descent,
Humbl’d & hurt by brash Americans,
Epitomised by one hardy sergeant;
Our big, bald Al,
As rough as gruff could be,
Stuck on Guadalcanal from Hicksville, Tennessee.
He watch’d the vaulting Perseids
Cause foeman’s vapouressence,
At times was forced to close his lids
To starbrite phosphorescence,
Struck by th’enchaunting Leonids
& life’s impermanence,
He remember’d what his Pa used to say,
“Son, life’s a loan, you’ll pay the debt one day.”
The Yankee seizes seas & skies
As the Imperatour,
Enlowers eyes, slouches & sighs,
“The army may withdraw…”
Bows Tojo, “Yes, your majesty…” then scuttles thro’ the door.
Tokyo
December 31st
1942
Imperial Dementia
An early death was considered likely
with an emperor so hard, so severe
in matters of belief
Jan Wagner
The pursuit of unbridl’d ambition,
Wildly bezerking thro’ civilised lands,
Oft leads to phantasies, as the vision
Of Empire crumbles to glitter-bone sands;
Hitler muses
Midst these mythopoeics,
So serenely ponders, “O, what should I do next?”
Another Christmas passes by
Still elusive, victory,
Cheer found but when his childish eye
Casts oer a model city,
By marble fire-place a sigh
Of wistful self pity…
Reliev’d by smashing up plastic soldiers
With models of rockets & jet fighters.
Retiring to his simple bed,
Old nightmares draw yet near,
Convulsions shred the shrieking dread,
Awake… awash with fear,
Blue lips babbling strange nonsense, gasping, “He… He… He’s been here!”
The Berghof
January
1943
Intrepedities
Though you may out of sight retire,
Malice will not be cheated so,
She can pursue where’er you go
Brooke Boothby
Captain Baron Jean-Michael de Selys
Saddl’d his typhoon without permission,
Whistling La Brabanconne askim the sea
Spire-tip Brussels swimming into vision;
Neath rooftop guns
Gestapo Headquarters!
Who murders Belgium’s sons, that rapes Belgium’s daughters.
At window-level whizz’d the plane
& pepper’d the place entire
With vengeful bullets, to sustain
Bodies tumbling under fire
With bursted abdomen & brain;
Watch the lone wolf flyer
Go treetop-touching down the Avenue,
To soar off high & melt in blue sky true!
Thro’ bodies, broken glass & blood
Rush stretchers & white sheets,
A crimson flood, a small crowd stood
Onwatching from the streets,
Stonefaced & silent, but inside singing from the songsheets.
Brussels
January 20th
1943
Zionism
See how villains make such noise
They turn birth & death into rituals
Fools fall prey to their shouts
Bullhe Shah
Too many massacres, dire & sneaky,
To mention in stanzettas – I’ll sing one,
Of how the Turks reduc’d Saloniki
From centuries of cultural Hebron:
The Holocaust
Accelerates the need
For better homelands, hors’d by Zion’s tawny steed
Rabbi Schonfeld supplies the plan
To save the Jewish fishes
Leave Hitler to his master plan
Un-netted in Mauritius
Tho’ parliament & churchmen fan
Flames of his best wishes
Such noble dream to save the Jews stillborn
When underneath the brier’s leaf, the thorn!
Yes, there shall be an Israel,
Her children are divine,
Like Azrael (prophet or asngel) the lobbies yell
“It must be Palestine,
Those lands promis’d to Moses on Mount Sinai, by sign.”
London
January
1943
Convoy
There is a silence where hath been no sound,
There is a silence where no sound may be, –
In the cold grave, under the deep, deep sea
Thomas Hood
America! Republic Young & Free!
Your Liberty remains supreme touchstone,
Keep safe thine arsenal of democracy
Til by great fleets to battle’s field is borne;
Your shore recedes,
Soon lost in hoary mists,
Merseywise flow the needs to feed th’Allied int’rests.
Our fleet in constant motion ploughs
Thro’ a ceaseless sea of silk,
The ocean crashes oer the boughs
Of Elizabeth & her ilk,
Gigantic herd of scatter’d cows
Laden with vital milk,
On all sides nothing but the tawny blue,
Sometimes an iceberg lumbers into view…
Jack blew into his freezing hands,
Inert, unthawable,
In vigil stands watching Iceland’s
Cliff rows formidable,
By nature’s beauty nobly touch’d… rip-tiding to battle.
The Atlantic Ocean
January
1943
Ghetto
on a morning of frost
in the soreness of waking
the cry of humanity goes out of itself
Lance Henson
Clack-dish echoes thro’ miserable streets,
But nobody has anything to give,
Death & disease with malnutrition meets
Where only HOPE whispers the will to live;
God’s earthly flail
Flung flat across Warsaw,
Grand flagellant unveils his ghoulish threshing floor.
Faith uplifted with the Torah
& the flesh of Hebrewdom,
Moses lights up the Menorah
Kinsfolk hand-held as they hum,
Proclaiming ‘Happy Hanukah’
& as the meal was done
Ludwig told stories of the Maccabees…
In bursts a breathless Karl with, “Father please
May we converse?” they left the room,
“I harbour gloomy news,
They wish our doom, up chimney flume
Intend to send the Jews,”
“This is not true…” “It is, but if they come we must refuse!”
Warsaw
January
1943
Avatars
Three hosts combine to offer sacrifice;
Three tongues prefer strange orisons on high;
Three gaudy standards flout the pale blue skies
Lord Byron
An old man drags his bulk across the sands,
Off-breaks beside the barb’d perimeter,
& clambors over, sharp wires dig in hands,
At once he’s accosted by a soldier;
“Hold it right there…
O my god, you’re Churchill!”
The P.M. gave his stare, the M.P. freezes still.
By Rooseveldt he takes his seat,
Discussive for the future,
“To German cities we must mete
The full wrath of the bomber!”
“Aye, until Germany’s defeat
& total surrender,
By Europe’s freedom all deeds must measure –
Japan may be destroy’d at our leisure.”
They left the villa for the sun,
Found soldiers to review,
Nigh ev’ryone American,
The fighters Yankee too,
That oerhead roar’d, defenders of the world’s most crucial two.
Casablanca
January 27th
1943
War at Sea
The sea shall seethe like boiling casserole,
Change colors, taking on unnatural form,
Showing its ill will at full blast to all
Ausiàs March
“Up periscope!” unveils a killing ground
By Seawolves circl’d in their hungry packs,
The feast is set, curl’d smoke plumes all around,
The silence broken, ev’rywhence attacks!
Cold & enpearl’d
The submariner rides,
Bellum Navale swirl’d beneath the whirling tides.
With heavy beard & nerves half shot
Xaver cursed his dank abode,
Often times his stomach would knot
As the depth charges explode
But when a new course would he plot
& the foe torpedoed
He felt his place with the warring nations…
Claxons caterwaul … to action stations!
Th’Elizabeth sinks! Jack Sumner’s
Clothes sea-salt saturates,
Haul’d by shoulders, joins the others,
Last lot of his shipmates,
Cramm’d in a bulging, wooden boat to contemplate their fates.
The Atlantic Ocean
February 1st
1943
(AA) Canto 39: Tornado
**************************************
Riding swiftly, Minaya Alvar Fanez kill’d thirty-four Moors with his sharp sword; his arm was stain’d with the blood dripping down to his elbow
The Poem of ‘The Cid’
Colonel Wingate
The temples are no protection:
the hunters are lying in wait
with traps & nooses & nets
Aristophanes
Burma… fresh bane of the British army,
Catalogue of defeat & disaster,
Receives a maverick visionary,
Determin’d to restore his land’s honour;
Daring designs
Regaled with sure surmise,
“Let me break thro’ the lines, harassing their supplies…”
He enlisted common scousers,
La, full of life & gobby,
Alchemied with Nepal’s Ghurkas
Busk’d in a dusky khaki,
He put them thro’ strictest paces,
Three months purgatory…
Gen’ral Wavell visits one stormy day,
Inspects them then salutes them on their way.
The vanguard of the re-conquest
Fords the Chindwin river,
Chain’d to the best, by good lord bless’d,
Sporting an umbrella,
“You never know when needed when tropical the weather!”
The Raj
February
1943
Pendulum Turns
And there before the night, he was aware
of the flayed fields of home, & black with ruin
The helpful earth under the tracks of tanks
Sidney Keyes
From the depths of a tractor factory
Rose a crackling corp’ral’s rattling broadcast,
Reaching within each German eaterie,
“Der Fatherland, der Fuhrer to the last!”
Lost & alone,
“Why are we forsaken?”
All animals hath flown, endure here only men.
Ivan came in ev’rywhereness,
“Hund wollt ihr ewig leben?”
In kingly, heroistic dress
Willie urges on his men,
Thro’ daunting danger & duress
Til all quell’d well, & then
He sits with his wife’s photo one last time,
Last round blows out his brains, walls coat with slime.
Paulus grappl’d with cruel conscience,
Cow’ring in the corner,
Christian sense curtails defence,
Consenting surrender,
How glad that captured mass of men meant for Siberia.
Stalingrad
February 2nd
1943
Death of Jack Sumner
The rage of armies is a shame of boys;
A hero’s panic or a coward’s whim
Is triggered by nerve or nervousness
Louis Simpson
They rais’d their spirits with an old sing-song,
Soon silenced by surfacing submarine,
At once old sailors knew something was wrong,
Those long, square-jaw’d faces far too serene;
Cold reasoning,
Der Fuhrer’s directive,
“Pity is burdening, let no opponent live.”
Sighting muzzles upon them aimed
Fuel enough for frighten’d flap,
“We are unarm’d, ye not ashamed!?”
Blonde rating straighten’d his cap,
Took four bullets, bloody & maim’d,
Croak’d, “Cheerio old chap!”
To this miraculously unhurt Jack,
Led breathless, daring not to answer back…
As Xaver survey’d the murder
He caught a faint movement…
As a Stemmler slays a Sumner,
Now unambivalent,
The goddess KARMA flit the scene & to another went.
Atlantic Ocean
February 3rd
1943
Death of Xaver Stemmler
Between the gem-hung velvet of the waves,
Our sires & grandsires in their green flesh start,
Bend skinny elbows, warn: “We have no graves…
Roy Fuller
E’er since the battle of Trafalgar Bay,
Those vigilant, oak-hull’d leviathans
Have held the Oceans in an Island’s sway,
“England expects!” ev’ry battle stations;
Night turns to day,
Depth-charge splash each quarter,
The decks awash with spray as under the water
Wee submarines are toss’d about,
BOOM-BOOM-BOOOOM & BOOM again,
Some sub-aquatic boxing bout…
Like fountains in a garden
Seawater spouts fill with grave doubt
Entrapp’d & frighten’d men…
Men coat their trousers in a cruddy goo,
As ships ripp’d up & simply flipp’d in two.
Almighty Ocean rushes in,
Thetis astride the bull,
Cat’clysmic din, Xaver aspin,
What weight crushes his skull,
To sleep the deep forever in the cold crypt of that hull.
The Atlantic Ocean
February
1943
Scented Roses
But the sunshine aye shall light the sky,
As round & round we run;
And the truth shall ever come uppermost
Charles Mackay
Plunge German spirits by Stalingrad’s wall,
Male students branded ‘coward dogs askulk,’
The White Rose blooms once more its glinted call,
Printing its stand against the heathen hulk;
‘Our dead adjured!
Kommilitoninnen!
We Deutsche have ne’er endured such tyrannies & sin!’
Willi Graf splashes graffiti,
Painting tin stencil slogans
All round the university –
Where its students versus shoguns
As thro’ each corridor empty
Trail the leaflet weapons
Of true friends of wisdom, lovers of truth,
Under a deadly, mad dog’s rabid tooth.
Sophie has join’d the Rose with pride,
To break the Nazi thrall,
Push’d oer the side a leaflet tide,
Like snowflakes soft they fall…
Between the gaps he saw her face, that man against the wall.
Munich University
February 18th
1943
Penalty Shoot-Out
It wasn’t history but memory
the day the township’s warriors stood
on the banks of the glen river
Aonghas Macneil
Partisans attack the camp at Siretz;
To avenge this impertinent action
Make answers for their grotesque karmic debts,
Every third prisoner faces the gun;
When name-by-name
Brave men of FC Start,
Have play’d their final game, plonk’d three persons apart.
Kuzmenko is the first to cry
Bull-clubb’d to the ground & shot,
Around Klimenko nail-fists fly,
By bulletstorm let to rot,
Shouting, “Red sport will never die!”
Trusevich marks his spot,
Stood proud & tall in a goalkeeper green,
Soon blood-stain’d in the Babi-Yar ravine.
The news filter’d back to the street,
Dishearten’d Konstantin,
Sick with defeat he went to meet
His mother in an inn,
“Worry not,” Christina whispers, “The final we shall win.”
Kiev
February
1943
Black Roses
My day is dune; & richt or wrang
The thocht comes like a waefu’ sang;
This Book & me we’ve travel’d lang
Hamish Hendry
As February sun deludes with Spring,
The pin-precise Gestapo get to work,
Grim narcomaniacs of torturing,
Brains mythomaniacally bezerk;
The ‘People’s Court,’
Judge Friesler at his head,
A traitor’s fate has sought, this day shall strike them dead.
As to the jackals they were toss’d,
For ‘sabotage’ & ‘treason,’
They form’d a holy pentecost
To interrupt with reason,
“You know as we the war is lost,
Cowards are in season!”
“Enough!” scoff’d Friesler, venemous & vex’d,
“I’ve found them guilty, guillotine their necks!”
This winter’s sunset is their last,
& this their final night
On Earth upcast, strength unsurpass’d,
Es lebe die frieheit,
For knowing freedom fought for sheds eternity’s delight.
Stadelheim Prison
February 22nd
1943
Russia Rises
For right is right, since God is God,
And right the day must win;
To doubt would be disloyalty
F.W. Faber
The pendulum commences western swing
The Wehrmacht thro’ thinwaist-high, wet snows wade,
The stench of death & swamp-thaw commingling
& Ivan seeming less of them afraid;
Their horses blown,
The battle-charge all spent,
A bitter spite is shown by every regiment.
As Buscher reaches Nastenka
As one the peasantry freeze,
Spying lovely Anastasia,
“Bring her here!” she turns & flees,
Soon captured by swift stormtrooper,
Soon naked on her knees,
She shivers as she’s dows’d in parrafin –
A match, a scream, hot hellfire strips her skin.
The thousand-year Reich in Russia
By the moment is reduced,
Each swastika, with hot anger,
Is ripp’d down from its roost,
As everywhere the liberated Stalin’s armies boost.
Mishinka
March
1943
Death of Franz Grunfeld
Surely the past from which the letters rise
Is waiting in the future, past the graves?
The soldiers are all haunted by their lives
Randall Jarrell
Years-on-years of uncheck’d persecution,
A brave few – finally – have lit the fuse,
Grenades & guns quite smartly smuggl’d in,
For this uncork’d uprising of the Jews;
The bullets fly
Into the German grey,
Better to fight & die than wait your murder-day.
Karl & his cousin, side-by-side,
Sense David interstellar,
When Philistine Goliath died
Beside the vale of Elah,
But SS swarming every side
Rat-trapp’d in a cellar,
Them Judah lions roaring in a cage,
Til flamethrowers incinerate their rage.
Above them, thro’ the smoky grates,
Gaurds resume their stations,
Thro’ hostile gates accelerates
Daily deportations,
As if lived Nebuchadnezzar thro’ these new migrations.
Warsaw
March
1943
(AA) Canto 40: The New World
**************************************
We are all under the same sky but we don’t all have the same horizon
Konrad Adenauer
Genesis
Overhead the seasons rock
They are paper bells
Calling to nothing living
W. S. Merwin
Before they taste the worst of wasted lives
Whom others breath deny by martial deed,
Before the flailing alien arrives
On Earth alight that bruis’d, enthirsted steed,
Before an age
Was vitrified in gore,
Let us devise the stage & lay its playful floor.
From stardust is a planet made
Then leave the rest to science,
Eftsoons we’ll hear the rise & fade
Of songbirds in alliance,
A never-ceasing serenade
Most happy circumstance
Of swallows following Dawn’s constant roll
Aslant a planet spinning pole-to-pole.
Thro’ lightning flash, hail-stones of coal,
Destruction decollates,
Those mires that maul, those fires that fall,
All breathing devastates,
While dregs of flesh existence call hopelessly to their mates.
Mexico
65,000,000 B.C.
Helen of Troy
And in the visions of romantic youth,
What years of endless bliss are yet to flow!
But, mortal pleasure, what art thou in truth!
Thomas Campbell
Not setting sun, not rosy-finger’d dawn,
Nor ocean’s pearl; not breezy mountain air,
Not spider-spun, nor lazy summer lawn,
Could e’er to this temptressy smile compare;
Her wide-sought hand
Won by the Spartan king,
Many a Grecian band gifts to their wedding bring.
From vinegar festivities
Paris woo’d her to one side,
Venus entwining destinies
As this hot, bedswerving bride
Sings lush, erotic melodies,
& sucks his love inside –
Afterwards, englamour’d with enchantment,
Thro’ spacious halls their silent footsteps went.
Moonsphere makes webbings in the waves,
Men row a ship to sea –
As future craves the golden graves
Of immortality,
These sweethearts, silken-sheeted, milk the teats of exstasi.
Aegean Sea
Birth of Gesu
In patience, then, possess thy soul,
Stand still! – for while the thunders roll,
Thy saviour sees thee through the gloom
William Allen
Rays of pure stardust pulse across the Earth,
According to some alien design,
For deity desires a humble birth
When interplanetary spheres align,
The Starchild born,
Warm & mellow manger,
His writ the world to warn of the Devil’s danger.
The virgin mother sent her child
To a cult of strict Essene,
With them the Dead Sea scrolls were filed,
Ancyent prophecies to glean,
With them this little lad was styled
Until he turn’d thirteen,
When Mary’s boy restor’d to Nazereth,
Naught but hell-burning brains & wafts of death.
Like sharp, shark fins the sins of Man
Round the incarnate swirl’d,
As Romans ran their sordid plan,
Thro’ war-polluted world –
Boy tutor’d in messiahdom, or Heaven’s face unfurl’d?
Judea
2 A.D.
Carolingia
The birth canal is yours
Either to open or to close.
Open it you must, dear elders
Hermana Ramarui
His armies birds in sky & trees on earth,
On Christmas Day was crown’d great Charlemagne;
King-conqueror, far from his cradle-birth,
He rais’d a triumph from a Caesar’s train;
Holy empire
On pagan planet won,
Whose perfect seed shall sire a spotless, proud-heart spotless son.
This pious Louis took a wife,
All the Angels deem’d her good,
These conjuring more regal life
Protected the sacred blood,
Each wise as Rome, each fair as Fife,
Each strong as Flemish wood,
Each gather’d by their father’s dying bed –
He drew them close & choking phlegma said,
“None of ye shall be Emporer,
But each a realm shall reign;
Italia, Germania,
The Franks & Aquitaine…”
Friction on such division stood, fought out on blood-fraught plain.
Aachen
843
Alfred
It may be glorious to write
Thoughts that shall glad the two or three
High souls, like those far stars that come to sight
James Russel Lowell
Only the lords of Wessex dare defy
The victual flamboyance of the Vikings,
“Are we not Saxons?” rings a captain’s cry,
The morning chorus of the English kings;
As great a man
As ever was Pompey,
Driving his battle-plan along the old Ridgeway.
They met the Norsemen on the hill
Life’s liberties to defend,
In moments making time stand still,
Immortalities suspend –
Britain some Nordic overspill
Or war-heroic blend?
As Saxons tough the better of the fight
Ravens of breaking cloth are put to flight.
Upsrpings a worthy capital
Laws writ in native tongue,
The chronicle of his struggle
Preserv’d in prose & song,
Then marries into Mercia to make his nation strong.
Winchester
892
Holy Roman Empire
While Rome could none esteem
But virtue’s patriot theme
You loved her hills, & led her laureat band
William Collins
Distant princes court Alfred’s grand-daughters,
Enchaunted by their dancing beauty’s youth;
Perfect as pearl, skin soft as spring-waters,
Souls hankering for virtue-verdur’d truth;
King Otho’s bride,
Edgitha, shares his reign,
Her Saxon blood allied with sacred Charlemagne.
“How yearnst I,” sighs the emperor,
“To unite all Germany,
Bind beautiful Bavaria
To blueberry Lombardy,
Blend heather-scented Swabia
With sunny Saxony –
Administ’ring, with Papal proconsent,
The central portions of this continent.”
Arose a sense of nationhood
Tied by Teutonic tongue,
In hall & wood, great tayles of blood,
The Niebelungen song,
Stirr’d up a spirit where the soul of Seigfried soar’d among.
Germania
962
Rise of Paris
The city’s all a-shining
Beneath a fickle sun,
A gay young wind’s a-blowing
Sara Teasdale
Long since the notion struck the Parisii
To settle by the Seine, & since sublime
Lutetia prais’d each Ceasar’s victory,
This eagle’s nest, amidst the mists of time,
Claims Frankish throne,
As jangling jongleurs sing,
“One of our very own has been elected king!“
How many noble knights advance
Gorgeous daughters for the bride
Of Hugh Capet, the first in France,
Whose Parisians beam pride,
But only one lass stands a chance,
As once again allied,
The blood of Charlemagne & Alfred merge,
One wedding night, abed, with mighty splurge.
“So this is life!” the pilgrim said,
Upon the paths to Spain,
To slowly tread, with fruit & bread,
The roads thro’ Aquitaine
Meeting, en route, the valorous, the vocal & the vain.
France
990
New Spain
But just before the end
there is always this crepuscular hailstorm
echoing base voice owned by men
Elvis Gbanabom Hallowell
Not knowing world empire was theirs’ to sire
Fair Isobel’s promis’d to Fernando,
With passion elevating cannonfire,
Grenada falls beneath their combin’d blow;
United land
Centred upon Castille,
Chief of the bible brand with homicidal zeal.
From Genoa Columbus came,
Whose fleet from Cadiz set sail,
The lure of spice, the lust for fame,
Thro’ bold missions would prevail,
Each sunset ‘rison flash’d aflame,
Or brooded on a gale,
‘Til verging on a murd’rous mutiny
Thin verdant sliver parted sky & sea.
“I claim this place for regal Spain,”
Flag thrusteth into rocks,
“This pleasant rain must grow our grain
& feed our teeming flocks,”
On board, a sickly sailor’s breathing death-streams of smallpox.
America
1492
Motecuhzoma
In the beholding eye,
A thousand years of wind
Are cool
Shiki
There was a time when white men thought them best,
Of course we know this naught but braggart’s boast,
But then, there was a time when to the West
Great floating mountains landed off the coast;
“Quetzalcoatl
Has come!” the Emperor,
Faced with true immortal, tribulates in terror.
Hernando Cortez was no god,
Gunpowder was his magic,
Him over honor rode slip-shod,
Intransigencies tragic,
Snapping Motecuhzoma’s rod,
Sends tumbling, double-quick,
A vast empire of gleaming golden plate,
Consumed entire into the Spanish state.
Five hundred years, from pole-to-pole,
European empires
Shall each, & all, rise up, then fall,
Until the thought retires
That men aren’t meant to others rule… Cortez inspects the pyres.
Tenochtitlan
1521
(AA) Canto 41: Power Struggles
**************************************
In competition individual ambition serves the common good
Adam smith
Prophecies
Truth before time
Truth within time
Truth here & now
Guru Nanak
Nature has taught us have aspiring minds;
Fuell’d by the scholarly Byzantine drain
The genius of Leonardo finds,
& unveils, parts of our uncharted brain;
Renaissance men –
Tasso, Copernicus –
Muse with alchemic pen… with them Nostradamus
Peers deep inside his brass tripod;
Shiny, time-flickering eye
Sees mushroom clouds, brash act of god,
Pig-faced pilots heaven high,
Men harnessing a lightning rod
Tall houses scraping sky,
Saw metal monsters spitting yellow flame
Then saw a face, then heard a demon’s name.
Knocking his tripod to the floor
He shrank away in fear,
Demonic roar consumes his core,
Phantasms dissapear,
Fearing for Europe’s future ‘Hister’ writ thro’ misty tear.
Provence
1553
Thistle & Rose
Is not Thy Forth, as well as Isis Thine?
Though Isis vaunt shee hath more Wealth in store,
Let it suffice Thy Forth doth love Thee more
William Drummond of Hawthornden
London laments the passing of an age,
The virgin Gloriana breathes her last,
As cannon-molds of monarchs hold the stage
Proud Stuart bloodline pours into the cast;
Britain reborn,
One king, one law, one land!
The border guards withdrawn, the lords & ladies stand,
“Deirest bretherin & friendis
My two realmis I unite
To endis all oor quarellis,
Together wee must fyght
All oor rascally enemis,
Put them to common flyght,
Letting oor contree prosper with the peese,
& all oor revenues thereby increese.”
The world we live in day-by-day
Was born this very year,
This mortal clay, this keen swordplay,
This burgeoning idea,
That Britain is an entity, but destiny unclear.
London
1603
Pilgrim Fathers
Peach blossom that’s made thicker by the rain.
Deep in the trees, I sometimes see a deer,
And at the stream I hear no noonday bell
Li Bai
Far from the divine right of divers kings,
The Mayflower unburthens purer faiths,
Shores paradasean the North Star brings –
No longer men but ragged, pale-faced wraiths;
Indian chief
Welcomes his white guests in,
Advent of native grief, death sentences begin.
In the land of the Sequana
& the endless prairie plain,
Where the buffalo & cougar
Suckle Susquehanna’s vein,
Horseback tribes have lived forever
Praising both sun & rain,
Content to roam upon ancestral soil –
Now aiding pilgrims in their meager toil.
Seedling imperial takes root,
The plant begins to spread,
As shoot-by-shoot fresh towns recruit
Life to replace the dead,
Tough slaves are made to gather grain, rough soldiers guard the bread.
North Virginia
1628
Thirty Years War
Through a mist that makes five rivers one,
We bid each other a sad farewell,
We two officials going opposite ways
Wang Bo
As shepherds find pockets of anxious sheep
Pull from the flock, as Rajput palaces
Crumble with time, as when the pathway steep
Descends from pinnacles & promises;
Colossal Spain’s,
Catholic continent,
Enchalleng’d in her reigns by stern-soul’d protestant.
With this the vastdeath-time begun
Bespoken on gypsy palms,
Phrenzealous ‘Wars of Religion’
Pillage, blood spillage, ne’er calms,
Buoy’d by the Aztec bullion
Germany’s up in arms –
While three hundred petty princes squabble
Handsome burghers turn’d to brick & rubble.
The treaty of Westphalia
Ends three decades of wars,
When Europa had, together,
Made conflict, cause-by-cause,
With Prussian gentry musing, “this not peace, but more a pause.“
Berlin
1648
Sun-King
your smile was my sun anon,
you created upon the earth beauty with your ways,
and my soul in your garden lives on
Knut Hamsun
To be a Frenchman is to feel a king
& if a king of France then feel a god,
The fourteenth Louis, near life’s fountain spring,
Unnerving ancyent nations with his nod;
Thro’ cocksure steel,
& arrogance a shield,
Sends legions conq’ring Lille, Alsace & Flander’s field.
As godheads in their realms do reign,
Build palaces in the sky,
Upon the Parisian plain
Would heaven on earth arise,
Where courtiers sip dry champagne
& chandeliers surprise
The sycophantic fervor of Versaille –
Were men on earth ever esteem’d so high?
He builds a string of starry forts
Verdun up to Gravelines,
Then fills the ports with thrilling sorts –
Many a tough marine –
Combin’d with mountains barriers Europa’s queen’s serene.
France
1684
Treaty of Utrecht
Woe to thee, wild Ambition! I employ
Despair’s low notes thy dread effects to tell;
Born in high heaven, her peace thou coulds’t destroy
Maria Brooks
As Peneus & Alpheus combin’d,
England & Holland wash the wound of France,
Pour thwarting salts within; bloodthirsty, blind,
Into his dotage Louis did advance;
Dictating still
Quarrellings of nations,
Arse far from battle’s thrill & war’s degredations.
Then… what has France gain’d from his war?
Her towns depopulated,
Enemy pirates at the shore,
Her fields uncultivated,
Her country houses wick with Poor,
Death unsatiated –
At first, with Warfare men, say tis a sport,
But by the end just horrors they’ll report.
At last the Sun-King sues for peace,
To ‘paradise’ preserve,
By this increase Europa’s police,
Great Britain sealion verve,
Has occupied Gibraltar by which all world sealanes swerve.
Gibralta
1713
Clara MacDonald
Her suffering ended with the day,
Yet lived she at its close,
& breathed the long, long night away
James Aldrich
She met him, in the hot flush of her youth,
Working the lobster-pots of Port Appin,
’Tween creamy kisses lips scream passion’s truth,
So wed for love, her kinsmen took him in;
She bore three sons,
Each wore her husband’s name –
The sounds of pipes & guns towards their idyll came.
Alexander away did ride,
Joining with the Jacobite,
Tho’ calm she seemeth the outside,
Tears drench’d her pillow by night,
& trembling all her time did bide
For news of distant fight,
When certain words within her soul would burn,
“O mother, when will father dear return?”
Her prayers answer’d happily,
He strolls in with the mail,
Enbalanc’d three sons on each knee,
Told them a stirring tayle
Of Highlanders proud marching for a cause that must prevail.
Scotland
1715
Culloden
The grim, grey fathers, bent wi’ years,
Come stridin’ through the muirland mist,
Wi’ beardless lads scarce by wi’ school
Charles Murray
From frilly sleeves France slips the Stuart sword,
Then plays it like a Pittsburgh poker ace,
Imperial wars these days fought abroad,
To Inverness embattl’d armies race;
Alexander
Ran with his manly sons,
Yelling altogether toward the English guns.
Clan Appin on the right flank fell,
Questing for King & country,
Eye-slicing claymores faced Burell,
Gruesome-ended ancestry
As Haelan’ hopes turn to a hell,
Cumberland’s butcherie –
Heart haunted by the death-screams of his boys,
MacDonald fled, thro’ all the fire & noise.
He comforted his grieving wife,
“O, my darlin’ Clara,
We’ve too much strife, a better life
Awaits America,”
So sail’d, with dead sons’ families, from Scotland… forever!
Oban
1746
Pre-emptive Strike
Mark now the proof I give thee, that the brave
Need no such aids as superstition lends,
To steel their hearts against the dread of death
William Cowper
Musing at the Sans Souci, free from care,
King Fred’rick contemplates his nation’s fate,
A friend & confidente of Herr Voltaire,
Thinks deep into the future of the state;
The answers come,
Great powers on each side,
To solve the conundrum to warfare all must slide.
If he who laughs last laughs longest,
Those striking first strike strongest
Facing this self-inflicted test,
Fred’rick proclaims the contest,
Now foes in battle must he best,
No momentary rest,
For Russia, France & Austria, allied –
Only Great Britain stands by Prussia’s side.
The world, once more, shown genius
Exists in martial arts,
His warriors victorious
As battle’s many parts
Like children kept; from ammo carts to patriotic hearts.
Saxony
1756
(AA) Canto 42: Revolutionaries
**************************************
The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war
Norman Schwarzkopf
General Wolfe
We buried him darkly at dead of night,
The sods with our bayonets turning,
By the struggling moonbeam’s misty light
Charles Wolfe
The global visions of William the Pitt,
See certain sections shaded Preston red,
A puzzle with one piece struggling to fit,
Like racing gates with horses poorly bred;
Chess-player sent
To North America,
With one present intent, to conquer Canada.
Beyond my triple metaphor
Sit the pretty English fleet,
Spit-snarling like the dogs of war,
Quebecois quake in the street,
Night helps slip silent boats to shore,
Outflanking move complete,
Stood with his officers at break of day
Chiaroscuro on a page of Gray…
“I would rather have that composed,
Than gain the hot day’s fame!”
The armies closed, all problems posed
Brought down with shot & flame,
“They run, they run!” tho’ dying his checkmate had won the game.
Quebec
1758
Exhausted Peace
Blissfully lying
Under the falling blossoms
A skeleton
Enomoto Seifu
The spring blooms of a generation gone,
Some daisy-beds, some lucky to grow old,
How many names bore ‘La Guerre de Sept Ans,’
How many famous stories to be told?
As lovers rest,
Ladies tire of legend,
Economies depress’d, folk will the wars to end.
Deft as gliding ballerina
Sweden sidesteps the conflict
With this new Russian Tsarina,
When war too hard to predict –
Aye, Tom Thumb & Thumbelina
In thumb war cramp have click’d –
Even Great Britain from the fight dost flit,
Whose new Clown King closes the age of Pitt.
Loquacious diplomatic spree
Warms up the winter hours,
An unfriendly hostility
Presses down the powers,
Scratching their caps oer global maps as monkeys inspect flowers.
Paris
1763
American Revolution
Haste, therefore, each degree,
To welcome destiny.
Heaven is our heritage
Thomas Nashe
Liberty is the watchword of the wise,
Breeding-ground of modernist progression,
But skeleton keys fall not from the skies,
Freedom’s rarely won without aggression;
Paul Revere peers
Thro’ hazy salmon sun,
The enemy appears, rebellion begun.
“… are coming, the British are coming!”
As militiamen bare arms,
They run t’wards rhythmical drumming
Thro’ the thickets & the farms,
Soon the Redcoats boasts sent shtumming
& when the battle calms,
The township of Concord all smoke & flame –
Old world, new world, its all the bloody same.
As Fort Ticonderoga falls
& Bunker Hill was fought
The fight appalls, hot musketballs
Break bones & pierce the throat,
While ‘Continental Congressmen’ call Europe for support.
Philadelphia
1775
The Last Jacobite
I ask the just Creator
so much refuge from Time
that a tale of mine may remain in the world
Ferdowsi
Alexander commands a private clan,
His wife & three gorgeous daughters-in-law,
Each one a mother to a strapping man,
Gone with granpaw to patriotic war;
“Let none survive,”
The old man hiss’d his hate,
“Ah maybe eighty-five but ah can still shoot straight.”
Washington launch’d verbal attacks,
“Men of our wond’rous nation,
Should we suffer a tyrant’s tax
Without representation,
Fight for your flag, both whites & blacks,
Suffer depravation,
For in the end it is our destiny
To carve a contree fit for liberty.”
Each night ‘Mac’ told the famous tayle
Of Bonnie Prince Charlie,
‘Twas never stale, did never fail
To rouse excitedly
His sons of sons, now men them all, sat proudly by his knee.
West Virginia
1778
Independence
Behold the sun, which seemed but now
Enthroned overhead
Beginneth to decline below
Panini
As Essex battl’d Tyrone’s Ulstery,
When chivalry was bogg’d down in the peat,
Cornwallis seeks American mercy,
Yorktown’s surrender rendering defeat;
Britain’s Empire,
Pitt’s darling, lies quite wreck’d,
Gunn’d down in hatred-fire, time swung to retrospect.
News is whisper’d to MacDonald,
Half-flickers of emotion,
Tho’ body limp, A mind grown old
Still swam across an ocean,
Saw Glencoe’s massacre unfold,
As he, in slow-motion,
Drops chin to chest as poppies plush with rain
Decline their heads & drooping kiss the plain.
George Washington, first president,
E Pluribus unum,
His government shall re-invent
The Grecian theorum,
Sentry of Human liberty from now ‘til kingdom come.
The United States of America
1783
French Revolution
See, at her voice a new creation springs,
Exulting Fancy claps her eagle wings;
Swift on the clouds, by sportive zephyrs drawn
JD Worgan
Our spirit touch’d by memories of man
& how lone man by men a legend made,
As restless time moves thro’ her milky span,
His nerve shall never from our vigour fade;
Napoleon!
Fame risen to the stars!
When all Europa won, when Eagles march’d with Mars!
As other young men of his age
Upheld the Revolution,
Aristocratics assuage
Their swift, sharp, cruel solution –
He took a step onto the stage,
Some stocky Corsican
Watching the rues run red with royal blood,
The fate of France by none more understood.
Below the Bastille soft flutes play’d
Amid the broken spears,
Thro’ death’s parade the widow made
A well from all their tears,
When born from such beginnings Liberty must bleed for years.
Paris
1789
Republican Dawn
The mouldy structure of injustice crumbles down,
Crushing underneath its weight envy, enmity & hate,
The soulless canons of the cross & crown
Hristo Smirnenski
A vacuum forms where lived the lion’s pride,
Long line of Louis, lords of France & Spain,
Prostrate beneath the coming regicide,
Begs Bourbon cousins, “Pray restore our reign;”
Thus Austrians,
French liberty to foil,
March beside the Prussians, plowing thro’ Gallic soil.
One hundred thousand souls conjoin,
Gather’d neath Valmy’s steeple,
The Cock’relle cause the only coin,
This Army of the People
Draws steely barb from belted loin,
Storms up a hard, steep hill;
The spoils of victory soon theirs to wield,
The Berlin phalanx driven from the field.
The King is forced to meet his fate
With Marie Antoinette,
Minos awaits them at the gate
To answer for their debt
Gallants dying for luxury, the guillotine is set…
Paris
1793
March of Napoleon
Autumn night so cooly comes.
Lights up with stars
Above the broken bones of men
George Trakl
Promotion upon noble promotion
Napoleonic fame paints peaks & skies,
Opinion, from doubt to devotion,
Purported in the populace’s eyes;
When Heaven sent
Then Fate must surely steer,
From lowly Lieutenant to Gen’ral Brigadeer.
The Revolutionary call
Transforms to one of conquest,
Hapsburg Flanders & Holland fall
With all of the Rhine Bank West,
Now striking thro’ Cisalpine Gaul
French face vital contest
At the battle of Tagliamento –
Where genius, unbridled, runs the show.
As Austria’s retreats increase
Vienna shrinks in fear,
To sue for peace, the muskets cease,
His Aide-de-Camps appear,
To herald their great champion, by victory soar’d clear.
Leoben
1797
Copenhagen
The medal is awarded
when nothing more happens,
when the artillery falls silent
Ingeborg Bachmann
Ascending in a ring of rising stars,
The great Horatio steers his native bark,
From body mark’d by brutal battle scars,
His lone arm points out to stubborn Denmark;
As Northern League
Defends neutrality –
Parisian intrigue drives English fleets to sea.
Cleaving a path between the buoys,
Rare heart on a pinn’d sleeve worn,
The lads the Adm’ralty employs,
Oaks from a press-gang’d acorn,
Drape Danishmen in death & noise,
From wreck’d ships sailors shorn,
As Nelson’s magnanimous ministry
Rescues so many from a crimson sea.
From port-to-port the stories flow,
Legends soak’d in prowess!
French Consuls know their ancyent foe
Defies naval duress,
Says Bonaparte, “We must build fleets to beat the sea’s mistress.”
France
1801
(AA) Canto 43: Deadlock
**************************************
There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter
Ernest Hemingway
Rebel Mountain
There are mysteries in this land
between city and sprawl
that would take much digging
Michael Creighton
Among the shaggy hills of Montenegro
Hid ‘The Bandit’ & his apparitions,
One hundred thousand Reichsmarks for Tito,
Tying down thirty German divisions;
Force fed on zeal,
Typhus on sick parade
Despite desp’rate appeal Stalin shall send no aid.
A Wellington pass’d overhead,
Coughs drifting parachuter,
Dangling upon a nylon thread
Gangly English officer,
Donning the red cap, promptly said,
“Take me to your leader!”
(Tito laughs at that daft scarlet beret)
“You have put on a wizard show, I say!
I’m from Secret Operation’s
Special Executive,
With permission, your position,
To London I shall give,
Follow’d by airdrops & enough for you & yours to live!”
Yugoslavia
April
1943
Desert War
Only the blind and stubborn hope to track
This wilderness. The thoughtful leave their bones
In windy foodless meadows of despair
Sidney Keyes
Rommel retreats into Tunisia,
Romantic lands of Hannibal’s Carthage,
Scrapp’d out by Roman, Vandal & Berber,
Inspiring War, beautiful War, to wage;
Taking his last
Glances o’er Africa,
The vital days are pass’d, now to face Der Fuhrer.
A Sumner lad enters a room,
To bivouac there nightly,
Sauce bottle moved, boobytrap
The poor sod copp’d a blighty…
Soon led thro’ sad hospital gloom,
Leg sawn off at the knee,
From clench’d fingers the surgeon eas’d his gun,
Tom stared back blankly, “Yer goin’ home son!”
The Via Balbia is strewn
With hulks & jerricans,
The Arabs’ boon, from sten to spoon,
Bedecking caravans,
Nearby… anthracite corpses rot forgotten in the sands.
Libya
May 15th
1943
Chindits
Springtime’s rent asunder,
Half gone into pond & pool,
Half gone into the dust & soil
Tung Chieh-yuan
Thro’ delphic idyll of watery shades
Japanese lackeys track-tread sweat-streaming,
A mountain gibbon’s gibber flies & fades,
God’s artistry sweeps oer mortals dreaming;
Sly Ghurka stands
Up, up, from ground, unseen,
Sticking his dagger’d hands thro’ windpipe, throat & spleen.
The day’s bland meal had just been pann’d,
Bamboo shoots & curried snake,
A captain joins his battle-band
On a well-earn’d lazing break,
With blade & bible in each hand,
“The fourth course we shall take!
We’ll ram them up the barrel of a gun,
Keeping those bleedin’ rascals on the run!”
Hacking rough paths thro’ Jungle dense
By webs & drooping snakes
Tho tired & tense their fine-tuned sense
Always the right road takes
Til one-by-one they burst upon their goal as thin as rakes.
Irrawady River
May
1943
Dambusters
The very day one son was drowned
she lit the other’s funeral pyre;
two griefs, two gifts, destroyed her heart
Honestus
Europa’s moon looks brilliant tonight,
Peaceful apart from the lilted whirring
Of Lancaster fleet in perfect swan-wedge flight,
Splendid rows of Rolls Royce engines purring;
Wheeling around,
They face the Molder Dam,
From whom a whooshing sound & bouncing bomb did slam
Aslant the pane, leapt up & dipt
& spun for a thousand feet,
Like flat stones on a flat sea skipp’d
Twards monolithic concrete,
Then with a monstrous thunder ripp’d
A gaping hole quite neat,
Thro’ which a vast torrential ‘gan to pour
Into the vital vallies of the Rhur.
She heard a pretty whirring sound,
& turning she did pray,
Wild waters bound across the ground
Her screaming swept away,
With cars & trees & homes & livestock reeling in the sway.
Mohne
May 17th
1943
Forgotten Soldiers
We strive with earthly imaginings
To reach & understand
The wondrous & the fearful things
Otway Curry
The Gods help those who help themselves – the catch?
One’s workload must sometimes terrific be
Producing decisive effects from scratch
Gen’ral Slim reorganis’d his army;
Whose front extends
For seven hundred miles
Where Vishnu’s wish defends fresh ammo’s mush’d in piles.
Air bases rise, roads link them all,
Each man with fresh meast meted,
A single team, a single goal,
Japan must be defeated
As Monsoon rains just fall & fall
Malarials well treated
For war’s not only sword complexity –
While planners shore up each perplexity
Cha Cha Slim all sides inspires
Nothing’s too much trouble
Whose presence fires the old Empire’s
Mantras unshakeable
The sum of little victories makes us invincible.
Burma
May
1943
Lost at Sea
After the death spelt out in headlines, after the gains
Broadcast by the dispassionate voices,
Comes word to a village
John Pudney
Freda & Rose arriv’d at the butchers,
Sov’reigns & ha’pennys stretching round the back,
Where, as they went shuffling to the counters,
Foze Freda by a vision of ‘er Jack;
Pellucid glow,
Flank’d by blue guardian,
“Rose, love, we’ve gotta go… forget bloody bacon!”
Boy soldiers play War midst sandbags,
Down Cog Lane a telegram,
Some Azrael along the flags…
Maggie drops ‘er jar of jam,
Flush-hot, slips on her pumps & rags,
Rush’d out to find ‘er mam…
Collar’d with Granny flappin’ down the street,
For sev’ral seconds cold hearts lost their beat…
“Our Jack is missing, presumed dead!”
The ‘ole street ‘eard ‘er shout,
Base fears that fed on common dread,
Calamity & doubt
Are rude-releas’d into the world while scrikin’ ‘er eyes out.
Burnley
May
1943
Secret War
Then, goddess! then, while beauty blends with youth,
& wisdom woos thee to the bower of truth;
Thou com’st to genius – com’st in all thy charms
M.A. Shee
At England’s heart there stands a splendid house,
Both Oxford & Cambridge equidistant,
Grounds hush’d more than a sleeping harvest mouse,
The fine façade stately & innocent;
But step within,
A new world is reveal’d,
The day’s work shall begin for England’s unseen shield.
Crack team of elite specialists
Work hard on the ENIGMA,
Chess masters & cryptologists,
An expert crossword puzzler,
Mathematicians, star linguists
Brought from America,
To decode the unbreakable machine…
If Germany but knew she would go green!
“With but one panzer division
Reserve in Sicily,
The battle’s won before begun!”
She pour’d a pot of tea,
“As Sun Tzu said, To win a war first know thine enemy.”
Bletchley Park
June
1943
Michel’s Mystery
I know that buildings will be raised
where all you have to do is press a button –
hosts of northern lights will rise
Olga Berggolts
A man sat in a bustling Rouen street,
Sipping coffee & tripping on the talk,
“The Nazis have receiv’d tons of concrete,”
This was the moment to stub out his smoke;
His youthful mind
Sprang into sharp action.
The truth he must now find, without hesitation,
He clad himself in sober black,
Donn’d a silver crucifix,
Cycl’d along a woodland track
To the sleepy Gallic sticks,
Until he found a fence & stack
Of metal sheets & bricks –
How cautiously he changed to workmen’s blues
Then climbed the wire, wiping mud from his shoes,
Some loose, pick-axe he bluntly grabs
Aiding the deception –
One question stabs, ‘What are these slabs
Pointing toward London?
I must reduce this strange riddle,’ today his duty done.
France
June 27th
1943
Kertsch
My beloved’s hair fell, her breast throbbing
&, her eyes wilting, she asking:
for how many more days will the world burn
A.S. Said
Far from the front, from his phoney tower,
Resorting to a well-tried strategum,
Hitler arrays his army’s fair flower,
To attack the pendulum momentum;
His panzers roll,
Fresh blitzkrieg underway,
Soon first defenders fall one hot & sultry day,
Where aggression was confounded
Mid the orchards & copses,
Their panzers punisht & pounded,
Fields thicken with fresh corpses,
These killing grounds, litter’d with dead
& staggering losses
Weeping for this clash of superegos
Molten aluminium thro crackt vent flows.
Death roam’d about the battlefield
Between each pock-mark’d ridge,
No slope or shield, nor those that yield,
Were spared his privilege,
From life’s bloom bodies shrivelling, withering river-sedge.
Prokhorovha
July 9th
1943
(AA) Canto 44: Regimes
**************************************
It is easier to start a war than to end it
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Invasion of Italy
We are all in the midst of the journey
seeking the road home
in the vast universe without
Kassim Ahmad
“What is it all for, love & peace & war,
When both the wide way’d Earth & Man’s action
Remain as constant as the Northern star?”
Muse three old, mid-day crones down the station;
Their wise old eye
Translates the censor’d news,
Watching the trains pass by pack’d with Palermo’s Jews.
From harbours of Tunisia
Arab maidens sang goodbyes
To a fabulous flotilla
Form’d to ferry the Allies
To sandy old Sicilia,
Neath luscious sommerskies,
Overwhelming the unprepared beaches
Of shell-shock’d, co-axial defenders.
The scenery invokes the gleam
Of early Punic Wars,
When first the dream by hawk Tireme
Brought yon the Roman shores,
Spreading Hellenic legacy – cultura, learning, laws.
Panormus
July 10th
1943
General Patton
We are stampeding to end stampedes
We are fighting for lambs
Who are never likely to be born
Osbert Sitwell
Patton hot-steps onto the Gela plain,
With shoulder-pads & ego equal wide,
Ambitious utterly for this campaign,
A contest perfect for his buxom pride;
His bow unbent
No foeman could withstand
As Axis soldiers sent skidaddling inland.
The general struts ‘cross the stage
In a shiny, armour’d car,
All round his green swards come of age
In the the dusty hards of war,
Envisioning a full front page
Lures him like a lodestar,
“Step to it boys, come on, the Truman Trot!”
“Geeze boss, five miles an hour, its far too hot.”
The city chants, ecstatical,
“Down with Mussolini!”
Once beautiful the capital
Of citrus Sicily,
In war’s rough wake looks dead & lifeless like a leafless tree.
Palermo
July 23rd
1943
Escape from Colditz
God heard the embattled nations sing & shout
‘Gott strafe England’ & ‘God save the King!’
God this. God that, & God the other thing
JC Squire
Bligh look’d upon the verdant Molden vale,
Sheer schloss serenely firmamentward shoots,
So foreboding he grew a chloric pale,
Heart sinking to the bottom of his boots;
Oflag IVC,
Cold castle for bad boys,
Broad gates bolted firmly with such soul-scarring noise.
Oer the claustrophobic courtyard,
After evening’s cramp’d apell,
He watch’d the patterns of the guard,
Felt familiar feelings swell,
“I’ve made a plan, it sounds quite hard,
But best give it a bell!”
He told the season’d escape officer,
“Yes, good luck, it’s time we hit another…”
Nigel appear’d quite debonair
In German uniform,
Snook down the stair with perfect care,
Dropp’d where bright flashlights comb,
Brush’d off the dust, saunter’d outside & headed off for home.
Germany
July
1943
Elusiveities
Impetuous brains mistake the signs of God
Too easily. God would not have me waste
My zeal for Him in this wild enterprise
Lascelles Abercrombie
So long as tongue can build a home for song,
They’ll sing of Yeo Thomas all thro’ France,
Who parachuted in to live among
A secret army waiting for its chance;
To strike a blow
Against the thronging scum,
A struggle long & slow, “When will the Allies come?”
Thro’ brutally black market streets
To cafes of fine choosing,
Each flat-cap Maquis captain meets
Him, hearing “Hitler’s losing!”
In flawless French, as when John Keats
In a swansong’s musing,
Sang sweetly his La Belle Dame Sans Merci –
Fac’d with Gestapo grease or Police Vichy,
“Votre visage familier,”
He met with a polite,
“Vous faites erreur mon bon monsieur…
Some trick, perhaps of light…”
Then sped away by metro like a kestrel in the night.
Paris
July
1943
Turning Tide
Remember our transient life;
It takes months for a body to form,
Alas, a mere instant to go
Guru Arjan
Kertsch morphing from hope to emergency,
Its little instigator kept his cool,
Musing upon this news from Sicily,
“It must be a feint, they think me a fool!”
”Turn from assault,
From now spurn all attacks,
In Balkan hills we’ll halt them Allies in their tracks!”
& so, with all reserves coop-flown
The Wehrmacht cuts its losses,
Their Eastern Front by barrage blown,
Then sliced in two by sappers,
All round them enemy hath grown,
Asiatic faces:
A Turkestani waves the red flag high,
Storming the bridge ice-shrapnel splic’d his eye,
So drops the flag, soon waving proud
Clutch’d by some Kamchatkan,
Pick’d from the crowd a bullet cloud
Slays in decimation –
Flag rais’d by an Irkutski, always forward to Berlin!
Suska
July 12th
1943
Bombing Rome
A terrible change is come: I see a cloud
Brooding over the valley like the wing
Of a destroying angel dark & dread
CL Reddell
As a glass of wall-slung crystal shatters
Twenty-three years of servitude levell’d
By the wind, this Fascist dream in tatters
Italy dechatellis’d, dishevell’d
Whose streets accrue
Such celebrations wild
With Mussolini universally revil’d,
When pictures of his pated heads
Are gripp’d with force & fury,
Then ripp’d up, spat on, torn to shreds
The rage of the Azzurri
Rough-rip Fascisti from their beds
Judging without jury,
Serve beatings bloody, when swift to respond
With just one long wave of his hated wand
Ausonia he occupies
& bombs soon drop on Rome,
The Pope hard tries to soothe the sighs
Of those who’d lost their home
His white smock smear’d in Latin blood, tears shining in his eyes.
Albano
July 19
1943
Ousting Il Duce
In the blue span of heaven the stars appear
To wait, all gathered round;
& listen, listen! how the pipes sing clear
Giovanni Pascoli
Italia! nearest heaven on Earth,
To poetry thou art the perfect foil,
Where suckl’d Rhea’s sacred sons from birth,
Mars roams again across the blood-stain’d soil!
As capital
Suffers bombs midst beauty,
The Grand Fascist Council has summon’d Il Duce…
The coup chair’d by Badaglio,
“Our contree is in turmoil,
Thus, Mussolini, ‘YOU MUST Go!”
Fat man’s blood begins to boil,
He look’d around, “Et tu Ciano!?”
Caught in a traitor’s coil,
Dismiss’d summararily by the King
Arrested next, nursing a broken wing,
Was planted on this a pirate isle
Of coves & cliffs & peaks,
To the while in strict exile,
Where soft the old sea speaks
Of reliques of more handsome days, memorial antiques.
Ponza
July 27th
1943
Robbing Europe
He works with a darkness
behind his eyes,
understanding as he does
Owen Sheers
Long train’s pulling into stazione
Out steps green Goering, in silk pantaloons,
Kommandeering the art of a country
Pocketing Europe’s beautiful dubloons;
Such bandit runs
The Reichsbank vaults imbue,
When under Nazi guns who would dare to argue?
This perfum’d, man-mountain of flab
About Golconda lurches,
Conducting graceful smash & grab
On galleries & churches,
This Raphael, that marble slab
Kindling taste entices –
A jackal trawling thro’ those gilded stalls
Collecting choicest items for his walls.
He loaded stalwarts of rare art
Into his carriages,
As engines start, to ease his heart,
Thro’ thick ringed fingers
Bright gems cascade for men self made need re-assurances.
Rome
August
1943
Escape from Treblinka
At night, under the heavy burden
Of their dreams, their jaws move,
Chewing a non-existent turnip
Primo Levi
They’d heard the news, they knew the end was near,
Lugubrious, life pass’d knee-deep in death,
But now, O day of God, the day is here!
When valour fills the spheregusts of each breath;
The storeroom seiz’d,
Its weapons handed out,
The panickers appeas’d, the worried drain’d of doubt,
As one, four hundred storm the camp
& pierce the wire to freedom,
Thro fields soon rumbling with the stamp
Of soldiers searching for them,
“Hide down there man, it might be damp,
But away I’ll lead them
& free you when the coast is clear, dear friend!”
“Thank-you,” hugs Jankiel as his feet descend
Those cellar steps, those secret stones,
Those keepers of his fate:
Treblinka groans, Treblinka’s drones
Were his to rubricate,
Whatever fallen Nazis in the future fabricate.
Maliszewa
August 2nd
1943
Mumble Words 