(AA) Canto 50: Napoleon
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The most persistent sound which reverberates through man’s history is the beating of war drums
Arthur Koestler
Invasion’s Verge
I have lived in the ecstasy of battle.
The throbbing of guns, growing yearly,
Had been drum music to my ears
Herbert Read
A conqueror chokes up the Channel coast
His Grand Armee’s grand camp, & grander still,
The ambition to sail this eager host
Across the tide to execute the kill;
Two thousand boats,
Two hundred thousand sons,
& thirty thousand goats, with countless swords & guns.
Ambition turns to thwarted dreams
For fishes out of water,
Who’d thought naught could avert their schemes,
Britannia saves from slaughter,
Whose Nelson steers hervicious beams
Soon, afraid to fight her,
Villeneuve diverted from the myrtle seas
Back to Cadiz, via the Antilles.
As dispatch reach’d the Emperor,
“This is gross betrayal!”
With, “Sacre Bleu!” with “Merde! Mon dieu!”
He curs’d his admiral,
“Then let us march to Austria, I must have my battle.”
Boulogne
1805
Trafalgar
Sailors, drag your anchors out
from their harbour hideaways
& coil the dripping hawsers in
Antipater of Sidon
A fleet departs Portsmouth in stately flow,
Nelson’s sword-heart-beat pulsing for the game,
Transglobal oars his name all slowly know,
Setting so many foreign flags aflame;
Up in the van
Signals the Victory,
“England expects each man enact his own duty!”
Athwart all current theory
Devlish line has cross’d the ‘T,’
Divvying up the enemy,
Private conflicts in the sea
Conducted with cool energy,
One-sided killing spree,
“Nous surrendons!” as French, half drench’d in gore,
Kneel ‘neath the Spartan Sea-Lion of war!
“Kiss me Hardy!” Lord Nelson croaks,
“Kiss me my dear old friend!”
Amid the smokeswept, creaking oaks
England’s angels descend,
For death & heroism are companions to the end.
Atlantic Ocean
21st October
1805
Glorious Winter
A deadly silence step by step increas’d,
Until it seem’d a horrid presence there,
And not a man but felt the terror in his hair
John Keats
How many miles had Stefan Stiltski march’d,
Step-after-step, harsh-blister’d, ankle-sore,
Flea-bitten, sunbaked, freezing, flogg’d & parch’d,
Then rises random slaughters of real war;
Frozen musket,
Caked head to toe in snow,
Fixing his bayonet, his unit next to go.
He left the crucial Pratzen heights
With lads long time befriended,
The French look weaker on their right,
By them this was intended
Behind him marching Gallic might
Claims heights undefended,
Whose cannon murder thunderous wide spread,
The Russians soon outnumber’d by their dead.
As rounds are pounding thro’ the ranks,
Gouging a trench of pain,
France crowding flanks, old comrade yanks
Stefan’s arm in disdain,
“The battle’s lost, come brother, let us fly back to Ukraine!”
Austerlitz
December 12th
1805
Tilsit
We dream of being a ship,
Anyone didn’t think what wood we’d raise,
We intended to build it with vine branch
Dritëro Agolli
Like some black hole in Europe’s heart aswirl
The love of conquest draws the best men in,
Two years of battle prattle with a whirl,
Tsar Alexander knows he cannot win;
Facing defeat
Since Eylau & Friesland,
Two patriarchs shall meet across the Niemen strand.
Upon a little river raft
All Europa torn in two,
Where godlike signatories craft
Warsaw’s freedom, won anew!
They, after, dined & drank & laugh’d
Til evening’s twilight drew,
& parted they the firmest of firm friends –
Of course this is not how their story ends;
But that is for another time
For now let us suffice
With this sublimely fashion’d crime,
Daring to roll the dice –
The World was stolen by one man, a tiger midst the mice!
Poland
1807
House of Bonaparte
As up he mounts, and each with wonder sees
His speed and godlike grace. He seems to them
No more an Angel but a flying fire
Joost van den Vonde
As Josephine the Childless weeps for life,
Tempestuous storm-slash Vallombrosan
Erupts, her husband took another wife,
Some chubby, buck-faced, princess Austrian;
For seven years
Her table reign’d supreme;
Drying her noble tears she toasts the dying dream.
From Holland to Etruria
Via stately Germany,
The zenith of an emperor,
March’d in brazen majesty,
Valencia, Westphalia,
Frankfurt & Tuscany
Pray for his new-born heir, the King of Rome,
But… looking at these hairs upon his comb,
He knew that he might conquer kings
But never conquer time,
The flutterings of eagles’ wings
Drown out the churchy chime –
Bells welcoming the evening like a Languedoccan rhyme.
Paris
1811
A New Frontier
After them came the soldiers
With rifle & bomb & gun,
Looking for the enemies of the state
Charles Causley
Scarlet redcoats rampage thro’ Portugal,
Safeguarding Lusitania’s treasures,
Alas, events unfolded typical,
The sorry state of Britain’s half-measures;
‘Send Wellington,’
Rising reputation
Blows into old Lisbon… without hesitation
He wedges French forces between
The hammer & an anvil,
The first, fighting for King & Queen
Galway, Glasgow, Leeds & Rhyl,
The second patter forth unseen
Darting from kill to kill;
Blend Portugal’s intrepid militias.
With daring, dashing, Spanish guerrillas
From storming Badojozan walls
To wild Vimeiro,
The Duke controls the hapless Gauls,
Iberia’s hero
Secures the Salamancan ridge, then bridg’d the wide Ebro.
Spain
1811
A New War
When I remember with what buoyant heart,
Midst war’s alarms and woes of civil strife,
In youthful eagerness, thou didst depart
Amos Bronson Alcott
Napoleon’s embargo at full strain,
Belittled by those Peninsular ports,
While England gains good victories in Spain,
The Bourgeoisie crave tea & petticoats;
Alexander
Opens the door to trade,
His fellow emperor launches a hot tirade.
“How dare this peasant Muscovite
Deny my sacred orders,
The time has come for France to fight,
Men move up to the borders!
We must avenge this selfish sleight,
Satisfaction owed us!”
Two purple brothers, friendly once, with wine,
Hurtle to war like Guelf & Ghibelline.
“To arms!” six hundred thousand sons
March up thro’ the Empire,
The vista stuns, so many guns,
Some vasty field of fire,
Arrives an aide-de-camp, “Thy Grand Armee awaits thee, sire.”
Poland
June
1812
Turning Tide
But her children are in a marsh
Bogged, they have gone wild.
Yet, no one should worry
Susan Griffin
The path to Russia’s heart hack’d Cossack clear,
It’s conqueror trots thro’ the old city,
No Roman triumph shall await him here
Just ghostly streets salute his ‘victory;’
“What is that smell?”
Flames flicker candlesque,
Soon burning, fright’ning Hell surrounds his writing desk.
A score of letters reach the Tsar,
None in reply forthcoming,
His wily foeman’s rising star
Is from the ring retreating,
“This is no way to conduct war!
What will this madness bring?”
On every side his ‘far-from-grand’ Army
Live days like dying men – desperately!
Rapine & riot ransack wild,
Short autumn swiftly spann’d,
One meek & mild abandon’d child
Holds out her little hand;
A pretty snowflake melted there (as Alexander plann’d).
Moscow
October
1812
Retreat from Moscow
Their shoulders held the sky suspended ;
They stood & earth’s foundations stay ;
What God abandoned, these defended
AE Housman
At rumours of gross treachery at home,
By dog-drawn sledge the Emperor winds west,
His soldiers wilting in the wintry gloam,
New Bonnie Ruthven Prince; “Men, do your best!”
Namore the French
Dictate, shall, Europe’s show –
Thro’ thick unburied stench back, by Borodino,
The remnants of the legions track
The ruts of that royal sleigh,
Assaulted by vengant Cossack,
When only brave Marshall Ney
With one thousand fends off attacks,
Full fighting night & day,
Winning the Grand Armee a single chance –
To save themselves before the fall of France.
Ordeals only ten thousand last,
As silent in the street,
Crowds look aghast on phantoms pass’d,
Frost-bitten black the feet,
Those kings that conquer’d Moscow humbl’d cripples in defeat.
Paris
December
1812
(AA) Canto 51: D-Day
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The beautiful soul has no other merit than that it is. It carries out the most painful duties to humanity with an ease, as if it were acting purely from instinct
Frederick Schiller
Agony of Command
The sinking enacted
only in the flux,
the layers of the soul
Evangelia Papachristou-Panou
Two empires allied since the Peace of Ghent
Combine to strike a rival from the Earth,
Into low landing crafts their soldiers went,
With rifle, helm & ammo-belted girth;
Reading, smoking,
Enjoying life’s sweet breaths,
Of their loved ones thinking or conjuring their deaths.
Eisenhower bore cognizanze,
‘Supreme Allied commander,’
His charges set to march on France
Depending on the weather,
“Jan Mayen charts the likely chance
Of skies sweeping clearer
Upon the sixth… to risk it don’t know…
What do you think Monty?” “ I would say… go!”
The sirens of the Norman shore
Broke his indecision,
“But war is war, I won’t say more,
My thanks to everyone,”
& looking at his wrist-watch in an instant he was gone.
Southwick House
June 4th
1944
Denial & Destiny
The darkness whirled but silent shone the animals.
Just before dawn the dove flew out of the dark
Flying with green in her beak; the dove also had come
Josephine Jacobsen
Across Ribbentrop’s desk scorches ‘the sixth,’
He has the spy sack’d as a dissident,
“Heavy seas must deny that narrow width,
Send out “INVASION IS NOT IMMINENT…”
Generals peel
Their presence from the shore,
Went playing at Kreigspiel, lost in an unreal war.
From the auld Roche Guyon castle,
Duke Rochefoucourt’s stately seat,
Bound a happy, buoyant Rommel
Like the cat who got the treat,
With the promise of no trouble
Drives smiling down the street,
His wife shall get a gift on her birthday,
Those front-line tensions half-a-world away!
Upon the fringes of the Reich,
Fair coast of Normandy,
The Naiad psyche draws Friedrich
To sunset-colour’d sea,
“I am ready,” heart thumping free, “to die for Germany!”
Lion-Sur-Mer
June 5th
1944
The French Resistance
Ye sons of France, awake to glory,
Hark, hark! what myriads bid you rise!
Your children, wives and white-haired grandsires
Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle
“Blessent mon Coeur d’une langeur monotone!”
The second half of a Verlaine malaise,
The Herresgruppe proclaims oer the phone,
“Expect the invasion within two days!”
“If they must come
Then Calais it will be,
No need to beat the drum that startles Normandy!”
Maquis, Veronique & Pierre,
Gather’d in lip-hush stable,
English newsreaders grace the air,
“The dice are on the table!”
This moment’s majesty they share
Mote profound than fable…
Six patriots switch off the radio,
Then slip into the night to start the show.
Hastening to the sabotage,
Rail-bridge soon river rocks,
Across the stage a pent-up rage
Administers rude shocks;
Resisting, restless regions of down’d pylons, damag’d docks.
France
June 6th
1944
Piercing the Atlantic Wall
From so much opening of my arms
dreaming of the moment in which I will embrace you
they have become stuck in a cross
Pilar De Valderrama
Now entering the end-days of our War,
Grand finale of the Age of Empires,
Long story drench’d in misery & gore,
Now liberty attends to Hades’ fires;
Aft, “Three-two-one,”
Leaps first paratrooper,
Vangaurding invasion of Festung Europa.
Tis night, & the bright moon outglows,
Laird of a silvering scene,
Blossoming from droning shadows,
Drifting earthly-wise serene,
Rows of silken, cloud-burst heroes,
Yclad in Kendal Green –
While ordinary men storm’d the beaches;
Plumbers, miners, doctors, cops & teachers.
Some were fair game to rifle fire,
Others break limbs & backs,
Electric wire, beflooded mire
Extracts war’s brutal tax,
But many men survived the fall to form cohesive packs…
Saint Mere-Eglise
June 6th 1944
01:30
D-Day Dawn
The grand Redemption of degenerate man
Is not a single, independent act,
But one great system
Samuel Hayes
As midnight mists melted into morning
Dull cumulus obscur’d the summer sun,
A soldier greeted dawn with a yawning,
Gaze skipping waves… he tighter gripp’d his gun…
At last it comes,
This is the day of days,
A forest of phantoms prowls spectral thro’ the haze.
Beside him paus’d a French cyclist
Into smoke them both did peer,
Shapes turn to ships, they learn the gist
In a moment’s awful fear
A fateful , the hated fist
Of Britain’s bombadeer
Slamming close by, that frighten’d cyclist flees
As Freidrich Stemmler, now, in horror sees
Lancasters flashing oer the fleet
Some twenty sky-miles wide,
Flocking to mete death & defeat
On Hitler & his pride,
Shouts leaping from a bunker; “Every soldier, get inside!”
Lion-Sur-Mer
June 6th 1944
06:15
Bloody Omaha
Hear the wind moaning –
Oh, hear it blow,
hear the sea’s mocking cry
Murdo Macfarlane
Long lines of landing craft surge twards violence,
Rapping at the ramps like a woodpecker,
Bombastic bullets burnish the silence,
Sarge bellows, “Boys, this sure aint Nebraska!”
Sick trickles free,
Churn’d by the heavy swell,
Men splash into the sea, death welcomes them to Hell.
Each US Rangers LCA
Berths under Pointe du Hoc,
Tho saturated with sea-spray
With ladder & grappling hook,
They clambour up the slipp’ry clay
To deal a new Quebec,
Those ord’nary folk, inching up beaches –
Plumbers, Doctors, Miners, Cops & Teachers.
Lancasters race oer lethal beach
Blasted waste by mortar,
Where yet to reach the bluff, to breach
Holes thro’ awful slaughter,
Men bray by bobbing bodies bloating in bloody water.
Omaha Beach
June 6th 1944
07:30
Death of Freidrich Stemmler
Forget your father;
Forget your mother;
Forget your brothers, kins, and friends
So Chong-ju
Sense stirr’d by the bagpipe’s thrilling muster,
Willing to storm stone bunkers midst the slain,
A rare moment puffs-up Patrick Sumner,
As tho’ perch’d on the Pharsalian plain;
Veterans cast
A vision of Dunkerque,
France meets their feet at last… at last they go to work.
Dusty Friedrich drops down his gun
Hoping quarter, hands held high,
Steps out by a dying Frenchman
& his spike-entangl’d thigh,
Surrenders to an Englishman,
They stood there eye-to-eye…
Tho’ good of soul Pat’s anger fail’d the test,
His rifle raises… piercing panting chest…
Satisfied, the Goddess Karma
Departs the Norman shore,
Where a Sumner slew a Stemmler,
“What did you do that for?”
“One of ’em kill’d mi brother… had to even up the score.”
Lion-Sur-Mer
June 6th 1944
08:00
The Longest Day
Take what they have left
And what they have taught
With their dying
Major Michael Davis O’Donnell
The breath of morning burst between the drape,
Atomies dancing in a budding beam,
Frau Rommel felt a nuzzle at the nape,
Then made love to her darling as a dream;
Coitus fashions
Vestments wrapping soul’s core…
Banging-canker’d passions… Manfred yells thro’ the door…
All the world gains confirmation
That the Invasion was on,
“Great & timely operation!”
Pipe the newsmen down London,
“Sev’ral miles of penetration,”
Thought Charlie of his son,
“Longissimus dies cito conditur!”
He told his mother, wife, dog & daughter.
From starry cirque, arcane séance,
Freda’s fair spirit flew
To distant France, her mystic trance
Merges with milky view
Of Patrick resting by roadside, “He’s reyt, ‘ee will pull thro’.’“
Burnley
June 6th 1944
17:00
Beachhead
Remembering now that I have left love
tenderness, kind touch of flesh far
in another land far in another time
LW Griffith
Commanders relax upon Augusta,
Sooth’d by the narthex of the evening star,
The bridgehead secured in hard-fought order,
The British beaches linking with Utah;
Confidence high
Replaced the day’s fray’d nerves,
The Allies shall supply the war at those thin curves.
From the beach at La Madelaine
Shall venture Liberty Road,
The mulberries are floated in
With many a bulging load,
Amid the gruff, curse-pepper’d din
These vital piles are stor’d,
Food for the armies of the Alliance,
To fuel their progress thro’ the fields of France.
As Welshmen march’d to Agincourt
& Scotsmen, Fontenoy,
Within this awesome seat of war
Canadians deploy,
To live or die in Europe in imperial employ.
La Deliverande
June 6th
1944
(AA) Canto 52: Crush of War
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I long for you from the front
& I will find you when these days of fighting are over
Deep in the homeland
If only I survive
& if the worst happens
If the days of my life are counted
Remember me sometimes
Remember me with a kind word
Konstantin Siminov
Revenge!
Misfortune, I am misfortune,
& my shadow has betrayed me;
Suffering, I am suffering
JM Bognini
To each Departmente spread a secret smile,
Himmler determines one must soon be wiped,
But done, of course, with certain sense of style,
When every detail of those deaths neat-typed;
Choking cordon
Chain’d by Black Shutstaffels –
Village-dwellers summon’d by sick-chime steeple-bells.
Menfolk maliciously murder’d
Beneath a barn’s beam’d arches,
Whose women & offspring herded
Inside the lamb of churches,
Tram trundles twards the massacred
From Limoges slow lurches;
It’s occupants harried ‘cross the convex,
Exits seal’d off, some firebrand burns the hex.
Wylde shrieks leap from a holy place,
As rose the devil’s flame,
What witch-wound trace etch’d in the face
Of those who know no shame,
To them bestial savagery is but a bullish game.
Oradour-sur-Glane
June 10th
1944
The Truth Will Out
Let the hen be clawed; let the lion roar;
Let the foolish be pugnacious;
Let the heart be broken with grief
Llywarch Hen
Hungarian deportings are started,
The estimates well met – like herrings pack’d
& pickl’d in a tin -, all departed
For some camp or other, the whole thing smack’d
Of sheer unease;
With incredible speed
Cleans’d was the “flesh disease” that “never more shall spread;”
Spoiling Semitic minds to doubt
Europa’s soil, the plan is,
“But, better, Palestine, without
The false-sworn Kazakhstanis,”
Sniff secret Zionists about,
Whose visionary plan is
A Greater Israel from Euphrates flow
To Gaza, Antioch & Megiddo.
The BBC & New York Times
On Vrba’s words report
Thro’ conscience climbs undreamt of crimes,
Stretching our psyches taut,
Enpierc’d by fearsome frightfulness, of all life’s comforts fraught!
The Free World
June 12th
1944
Battle of France
Generations after you,
‘Neath the red, the white, the blue,
They shall reap what you have sown
JH Wilson
Life illumes all scenes the Nazis were
The Allies press on to the Sequana;
Stars & Stripes, Union Jack, the Tricolor,
Fluttering for Liberation’s honour;
With shaven pate,
Collaboratrices,
Watch enmity & hatred goug’d in angry faces.
Grand offensive bogs down & gropes
Thro’ the Bocage chequerboard,
Round Kalvarienburg’s red slopes
Deadlock blunts the Saxon sword,
Tho’ outmann’d, outgunn’d, ‘gin the ropes,
From airways slash’d & claw’d,
The Wehrmacht fight with heart so bold & big
As with the master after pass’d Leipzig.
A token force of six Tigers
Met fifty times their size,
What warriors forged in Russia’s
Rough fields of snow & flies,
No matter, tis certaincy they’ll be snuff’d out from the skies.
Villiers Bocage
June 13th
1944
Death in the Jungle
Devoid of desire or music or joy
but lying forever morose
till death takes me unawares
Donnchadh MaRaoiridh
Having swapp’d one prison for another
Slater conducts a bloody one-man war,
Slaughtering patrols, breaking for cover,
As septic sores from weak, white blood cells pour;
His makeshift camp
Sees revenge deliver’d,
Where fixing an old lamp his whole body shiver’d.
He knew that his life was slipping
So thought about his father,
Sweaty rivulets e’er dripping
Til slain by Malaria,
Thro his bloated, blue corpse ripping
Cometh Calliphora…
Attracted by a quiet, scratching sound
Some giant Sloth, three days aft, sniffs around.
She sinks her teeth, the body warm,
Its brittle, black flesh splits,
O see them worm, O feel them squirm,
Awful trove of maggots,
The Sloth coughs up her rotten meat, nose-snorting as she flits.
Thailand
June
1944
Doodlebug
The old strifes are done, the fight is fought.
And with a clang and roll, the new creation
Bursts forth ‘mid tears and blood and tribulation
Sir Lewis Morris
The Nazi grand plan seems less grand than deem’d;
From sites diminish’d by the Allied bomb,
Pilotless ballistics strataward stream’d
To shatter London & her saintly Dom;
The Blitz returns,
Death-tipp’d eagles flying,
Again a city burns, & its fair folk dying.
From heaven-scented Calverly
Caroch’d Air Marshall Dowding,
Gaea’s golden serenity
Burst by th’ear-splitting roaring
Of some Vee-One’s hostility,
Bent on mindless scoring,
It seem’d to laugh & flash above his head,
Towing a spitfire with determin’d tread.
Poised neck & neck, tipp’d wing-to-wing,
Perform’d a graceful tilt,
Curt unhinging… missile spinning
To corn fields at full hilt,
A ruthless killer thwarted, it’s quest’s nemesis well built.
Kent
June 16th
1944
Soviet Advances
Over the garden the moon’s tide tumbles;
Shrubs are shaken by gusts and tremblings;
Pathways ribbon with sudden dissemblings
Marie Under
Hitler has led his Greater Germany
To caddling nightmares of a three-front war,
What strength defends his eastern ‘victory,’
While barest handfuls watch the Norman shore;
From post-to-post
A rigid, nail’d defence;
The Allied bigwigs toast such frigid martial sense.
What courage crumbles for the fight
In the Feste Platze fortresses,
Without water, hope, or daylight,
Led by brainless officers,
Roll’d over by the Russian might,
Leaving pale sepulchres
Of dead & dying, hear their sorry pleas –
A young Thuringen begs on bleeding knees…
…Alas his pity-pleas ignor’d –
Prefers, Konstantin, force;
Who draws his sword, angers outpour’d
Treading the darker course,
From ear-to-ear he calmly ripp’d that throat without remorse.
Byellorussia
June 22nd
1944
Apprehended
So desperately
The leaves cling
To the departing fall
Shiki
Rebel rabbles in the rubble of France
To Berlin’s vengeant passions fall due prey,
Amy Gardner’s unhappy happenstance,
One random turn & road-block blocks the way;
Searching her car
Incriminates were found
Hearing the words , “you are under arrest!” they drown’d
Her in a bath & then revived
Her on the cusp of dying,
All thro’ a week of food depriv’d
They whipp’d her – “you are lying!
Like cormorants constantly dived
Tortures reapplying,
But some transcendent shield defends her core
Toss’d in a fusty cell, blank but the floor
In solitude & darknesses
Design’d her little girls
Pretty dresses, pattern’d tresses
Gave them bobs & curls
With matching fabric ribbons helter-skeltering in curls.
Fresnes
Bombing Budapest
I saw the follies of my former flame,
I turn’d indignant from the hateful sight,
Struck with remorse, and mortified with shame
HJ Pye
As bombs fell on Buda, paper on Pest,
The Admiral sat in his bunker, still
Reflecting on this message from the West –
No longer victim to herr Hitler’s will;
When leaflet read,
How grew, he, full afraid
‘Punish’d they’ll be,’ it said, ‘that deportations aid!’
Three hundred thousand Jews renamed,
But now the trains are halted,
Let Vrba be some saint ordain’d,
Or Sannhedrin exalted,
Thro’ his success in us ingrain’d
Is truth, bitter salted
Tastes it, but we humankind has need to reap
The depths of us, however sick & deep.
As this news to Hitler given,
His need to hold the line,
Relying on rebellion
Repress’d – he mutter’s ‘fine,
Come war what may, we’ll stop those Jews e’er reaching Palestine.”
Berlin
July 9th
1944
Angel of Death
The difficult tolerance of all that is
Mere rigid brute routine; the odd
Sardonic scorn of desolate self-pity
Alun Lewis
Cut by the bleeding edge of academe,
The Hitler-oath outvalueing his health,
Around vile work wild mussitators scream
Warnings unheard; by seizure or by stealth
He pricks & plots
Thro’ pseudosciences,
Hanging raw bibelots from claw’d appliances.
Repugnancies eugenical,
Dissections of chilling zeal,
Fresh eyeballs by the barrowful
Thro’ a cast of thousands wheel,
Experiments nonsensical,
Inhumanoid ordeal,
Labagonies commuted with a tick,
“Off to the chambers with her! Quick! Quick! Quick!”
He starves a newborn baby girl
‘Til a loving mother
Looks on her pearl, brushes soft curl,
Kisses with a smother –
Sufferings unburdening, a murder like no other.
Auschwitz
July
1944
(AA) Canto 53: Destructions
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Many people, soldiers & civilians alike, witnessed spectacles comparable with Renaissance painters’ conception of the inferno to which the damn;d were consign;: human beings torn to fragments of flesh & bone; cities blasted into rubble; order’d communities sunder’d into dispers’d human particles
Max Hastings
Bomb Plot
In the walls their windows staring blindly back,
And even the thatch itself was rotted black.
All was ruins, grown old; here death had come crawling
Maksim Bahdanovič
Noblesse oblige, when duty outranks praise,
Stauffenburg slips his oath’s constrictive grip,
Mindful of Mankind’s most valorous days,
He dares to strike at his dictatorship –
Not at the tail,
Aft’ which ye face the bite,
But thro’ the hissing veil the head conjures in fright.
He stepp’d into the conf’rence room,
Hitler glances curt, “Hello!”
The situation maps cry doom…
He placed his briefcase calm & low
Near Hitler’s feet, as sly as fume
This Colonel, quick yet slow,
Takes his leave, when driving thro’ the compound,
He made no flinch as bomb-blast wrenches sound.
Midst the Fuhrerhauptquartier’s
Dull rubble’s wracken rush,
Shredded trousers, shirt in tatters,
Hair tangl’d toilet brush,
“Fate has saved me, I now decree such treachery we crush!”
Wolf’s Lair
July 20th
1944
Betrayals
Anger lay by me all night long,
His breath was hot upon my brow,
He told me of my burning wrong
Elizabeth Daryush
What emotion transforms man to Judas?
Of all heartaches it must be Jealousie;
Constance leads the Gestapo with a hiss
To the old farm own’d by his family;
Watching th’embrace
At an upstairs window,
Taut pulls the jeune-tinged face as lonely torments grow.
The sound of jackboots on the stair
& rough Teutonic clamour
Drove Veronique to clutch Pierre
With full zest of her amour…
The door burst ope, this noble pair
Shied captivity’s floor,
Shooting those shapes daring to enter room,
Pierre leapt on the sly stick grenades …
She groan’d & rose, saw her soul’s mate
Sprawl’d lifeless where he died,
Dusts dissipate, before too late
She tried her suicide…An empty… CLICK… down by her hair ‘Der Bitch!’ is dragg’d outside.
France
July 29th
1944
Revolt
war raged and found profit in colonial lands!
war raged and killed babies in their cradles!
war raged, and destroyed cultural values
Usman Awang
Stalin urges all Polish pride to rise;
Its capital in ruins since its fall –
Emblem of sad defeat, but not demise
For what could break the white-tail’d eagle’s soul;
Fresh hope talk balms,
As Russian tanks draw near,
The citizens take arms, abandoning all fear.
This War’s grey incunabula
Erupted to no avail,
For ruthless, fuel-full Luftwaffe
Dowse belief with lethal hail,
While watching on biovular
Those sister-Slavs derail
The plan; yon the suburbs tanks sat idle;
Stalin, uncompassion’d, at the bridle.
The Nazis reaffirm their grip,
Unleash a savage hate,
This sinking ship, this rubbish tip,
The Poles evacuate,
& shuffle, ragfoot, to the west, cursing their country’s fate.
Warsaw
August
1944
Vengeance!
Impaled on the moon,
a boy’s head is banging for justice.
A mother’s harvest blights at noon
Toyin Adewale-Gabriel
They said in the night all the cats are grey,
Suspicion falls on all but his closest,
The ‘coup’ fizzles to naught by close of day,
Its circle of usurping soul-depress’d;
“Ich bin OK!”
Grateful Volk hear his voice,
“Providence dost display my destiny her choice…”
Financiers of treachery,
Self-made victims of the plot,
Von Stauffenburg dealt with quickly
For defying the despot,
“Long live our sacred Germany!”
Proud-statured as he’s shot,
I wish you could have seen his dying face,
So free of doubt, weightless & full of grace.
Such a sense of shock’d resentment
Spreads thro’ the German world,
Their Fuhrer sent to them unbent
By traitors’ fury hurl’d,
While fires of the Ragnarok a little higher curl’d.
Berlin
August
1944
Libertie
Is it not better to bear Beauty’s weight,
Hold up your arches, solid as rock,
Than to feed the hearths of the world’s hot hate
Laza Kostić
Aux Barricades! With patriotic surge
Frenchmen are bursting from a new Bastille,
Deep gusts of fresh freedom from lungs emerge,
Each swastika torn down in frantic zeal;
A grim return
Hounds collaborators,
Naked, a la lanterne, spat at by beraters.
One gorgeous day in late summer,
Spiedel, Praetor of France,
Shall defy his master’s order
With an innate elegance
Saves the treasures of the Louvre,
As thro’ the streets advance
Those gutsy guns, those GI miracles,
Kiss’d on all sides by smiling mademoiselles.
Two nations born of human light
Illume the great parade,
A supreme sight, a dream delight,
La Marseillaise is played
No time to rest in revely, off to the front they made
Paris
August 26th
1944
Quaesitors
In this crooked dead end of a bitter cold
They keep their fire alive
By burning our songs and poems
Ahmad Shamlou
Into the solemn Prinz-Albrechtstrasse,
Foul heart of an empire within empire,
Crapulent on the banquets of power,
Men to a curv’d brutality aspire;
In dark & daze,
Behold the secret police,
Their diabolic ways rule an imperfect peace.
Thro’ all the doors of Germany
Slime tentacles penetrate,
Each plotter & his family
Shall face a queasitor’s fate,
Footsteps clunking full heavily,
Blood trickles down a grate,
Men broken by a callousness sublime
Reveal the names implicit in the crime.
Tied to a blood-stained wooden rack,
Sorrowful Stulpnafel,
Screams out as crack cuts cross his back,
“No more!” the bull-whip fell,
“Give me a name you filthy hund,” a whisper, “Herr Rommel…”
Berlin
August 29th
1944
Strategy & Tactics
The eagle is king of the birds; among fishes
Leviathan holds the first place,
Cleaving the far, crimson cloud
Sung Yü
Round bed-swapping corridors of power
Hop top-shop gen’rals, Monty’s dropp’d one down,
“But as a sop,” whisper’d Eisenhower
“Adorn his stars with some Fieldmarshall crown”;
“Blame Roanoke”
Fumes Bernard, as he seeks
Audacious masterstroke to end the war in weeks.
“Colonials contemptuous,
Being too pedestrian,
Let us the Siegfried Line bypass,
Paras capture Njimagen
Then Arnhem, there’ll be little fuss
Old men, just, & children,
In that whole sector now protect the Rhine…”
Churchill emits thick smoke, then admits “fine…
Better than each yard a battle…”
“Ike’s unfit to command!”
Unbeatable, unbearable,
They shook each other’s hand,
By contact steel’d, by contract seal’d, by compact concert grand.
Brussels
August 30th
1944
Rousing the Reich
Sampling the possibility of doom
See us searching the papers
Nursing the radio
Shake Keane
“Is Paris burning?” huff’d wistful Hitler,
Fat face so pale & puffy, taut & tense,
A grunt as enters General Molder,
“It can’t go on, this War is lost…” “NONSENSE!”
Chasing rainbows,
A vision is devised,
For deity still flows & soldier mesmerised.
“Tis time to mobilise fully
All of the land’s resources,
From the workers of Germany
Draw Volksgrenadier forces,
Show iron vein til victory
Rides on Asgard’s horses,
Back to the Reich as the Ultramarxist
Breaks ranks with the Ultracapitalist!
Yes, we shall fight upon the Rhine
As did Fred’rick the Great,
No Nineteen Nineteen shall define
The future German state…”
Sighs Molder, “I shall try again…” for that man was his fate.
Wolf’s Lair
August 31st
1944
Operation Market Garden
In church the bell is tolled,
In barracks at the last bugle note
Soldiers like ants file
Stephen Lubega
Night falls on nose-to-tail planes park’d pack’d up
While men they’ll soon convey to blossom sky
Watch ‘Hellzapoppin’, roving pub-to-pub
Singing, “three cheers for the next man to die!”
Then restless sleep
When dawns that day of days
Long sewn, them all shall reap, up leap the Red Berets.
So many Harrys, Dicks & Toms,
Like webbing-spurting spiders
Swell aircraft bellies stripp’d of bombs
Fill shells of smelly gliders
By Horsas haul’d, as intercoms
Rippl’d thro’ the riders;
Hamilcars, Dakotas – so glorious!
Have Heaven fill’d… pass Paras down the bus
Singing songs of ‘Liberation!’
The flocking people trekk’d,
First Eindhoven, then Njimagen,
By orange flags bedeck’d,
But… further north the plan slow’d down by vital bridge’s wreck’d.
Holland
September 17th
1944
(AA) Canto 54: Flagellants
**************************************
Germany would have become so beautiful, strength through joy, spare time & recreation, new dwellings, the most beautiful cities & villages have been planned, service & just wages, a great, unique health program, social security for the aged & incapacitated. Roads construction & traffic lanes, ports & settlements – how beautiful Germany could have been, if, if, if, & always again, if
Robert Ley
Drop Zones
I’ve stopp’d under a bridge
I haven’t been able to continue
The rain is falling
Miguel James
Superdaring, salted porridge Paras,
From landing parks have disembark’d in troops,
Dark apaches, flashing bows & arrers,
Dash off to catch the scoopiest of scoops;
‘Good morning’s curt,
Their ’saviors’ Dutch embrace,
As with a speedy spurt off to the bridge they race.
A misty day, resistance light,
As bullets pitter-patter
The enemy began to fight,
The streets burn’d black with splatter,
The bridge intact, as in its sight,
Mad as maddest ‘Hatter’
“Woah Mahomet!” on English tongues erupts,
The bridge hard storm’d, secur’d, its sentry huts
Become bold battle bastions,
Now all to do is wait
With loaded guns, ‘til hordes of Huns
Along the bridge shall spate,
A colony of sexton beetles dug in at the gate.
Arnhem
September 17th
1944
Gott Mit Uns
Say not the struggle naught availeth,
The labour & the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not, nor faileth
Arthur Hugh Clough
Model assess’d the day & gladly found
Schutzstaffel legions seasoning nearby,
Harden’d by battle on the Norman pound
& all resolv’d, for Germany, to die;
Convey’d by gusts
Of war, in interims
Kampfwillen readjusts, with lock’d & loaded limbs,
They straf’d & block’d the roads that led
To Arnhem, where, embolded,
They met the foe & shot them dead
As gory fight unfolded,
Some snake-plan sever’d at the head,
Monty’s ‘baby’ scalded,
By boiling pitch, endowsing flame’s flaught flames
Like gladiators in dictators’ games.
They fought as if Bhishma-possess’d
On Kurukshetra’s field,
Breathing their best, needing no rest,
The Irminsul unseal’d,
Defending ancyent tribal tracts with battle-axe & shield.
Holland
September 17th
1944
Best of British
The god of war is drunk with blood
The earth doth faint & fail;
The stench of blood makes sick the heav’ns
William Blake
Hope bash’d her head against the realis’d,
Arnhem, it seems, was just a bridge too far,
A slice of dramaturgy ill devis’d,
The ragged hoo-har of a too high bar;
Facing defeat
For certain, still men fought
In garden, shed & street, spreading their deadly sport.
Since Tewekesbury & Naseby field
The English quite united,
Since Charlie dropp’d the Highland shield
The Scots have too alighted,
A Union, one two thirds seal’d
When the French affrighted
By longbows lethal-streak’d at Agincourt,
What wonders when a Welshman goes to war!
So climb ye Cymric, English, Scot
Three nations, side-by-side,
Form sinew-knotted polyglot,
By glory unified
But not this deed’s alarum, Isandlwanaring the pride.
Arnhem
September 22nd
1944
A Bitter Pill
Before him ran a miserable confusion
Ruin & battle & a grievous end
On struggle, blood & struggle, on terror, dire terror
Gwalchmai Ap Meilyr
Carries on the Para’s constant swinking,
The situation slipping to austere,
The Osterbeek perimeter shrinking
From hope to apprehension, then to fear;
From waxen face
Dumb sockets sit & stare,
Defeat’ll mean disgrace forever, everywhere.
Nine days of Hell, & now they’ve fled
Across the river spuming,
Behind them fifteen hundred dead
& seven thousand fuming
At being caught, among them said
Soldiers, unassuming,
& missing legs, as imprison beckon’d,
“We lost, but at least we finish’’d second!”
They made them at the face of coal,
They made them in the mills;
The long, the tall, the short, the soul
Of Alba’s goat-fill’d hills,
Who fought like caustic demon hounds who’ll slaughter Baskervilles.
Arnhem
September 25th
1944
Death of Rommel
I shall go back
to the formless clouds
& melt myself into rain
Jared Angira
Two automons knock’d on a legend’s door,
Charging their target with highest treason,
But.. for his services throughout the war
Der Fuhrer has permitted him poison;
Serenity
Succumbs his famous wits,
“Speak with your family, but for fifteen minutes!”
He told his wife of his life’s debt,
Embraced his beloved son,
Donn’d old Afrika Korps jacket,
Attach’d Field Marshall’s baton,
She was nobility, & yet
She wept when he was gone,
Away into the forest & his fate,
Car halts, his captors leave the car & wait…
By seat-slump’d star these pale drones stand,
Now Rommel ‘gan to cry,
“Death by the hand of one’s own land
So hard,” stripp’d of all pride,
He wheez’d his last, closed gemmy lids, thought of his wife & died.
Swabia
October 14th
1944
Last Days of the Reich
And this is the crisis-point
The twilight moment between
sleep & waking
Chirstopher Okigbo
Some vale East of the Lakes Masurian
Bleak Prussian homesteads clad in sober grey
Refuse to flee in face of the Russian
Though murder is the order of their day;
Huddl’d in song,
Shells smash through cottage wood
Slaying a peasant throng, soil drinking native blood.
Throughout the Nazi satellites
Roam doubters for eversion,
Bulgaria no longer fights,
The Baltics scream aversion,
Finland leaves Hitler to his plights
As the Romanian
All land & liberty to Stalin yields –
Seizing those vital Ploesti oil-fields.
How darkly disgusting is war
When war’s ways rumble home,
The drumbeats are frightful afar,
The Volk of Berlin’s Rome
Prepare a Way of Spartacus towards the Reichstag dome.
Germany
August
1944
A Change of Tone
This is what you get for begging to be
chosen: every god in the universe eyeing
you through the clouds like a hot wound
Vandana Khanna
As Churchill stood the Commons silent fell,
Sweat, blood & tears in all of them instill’d,
Whose promise of, “One day all will be well…”
Had made them fight despite whom might be kill’d;
With glasses push’d
Up noseridge, he begins
“This war will not be rush’d, but Britain always wins.”
While fighting tyrants & their crimes,
With the Germans fled from Greece,
Let victory attend these times,
People prosper best in peace,
With Hitler slipping in his slimes
Our phantom shall soon cease
To haunt our living days & wailing nights…”
Cheers raced around his face, still shining bright
No longer lonely beaconflame
Of hope in awful night,
But lit the same as all, became
The one burning most bright
Among the luminescence of a land in vital fight.
London
October
1944
The Contract of the Spies
bones in cold spaces
a heap of souls’
robbed glances
Karina Fiorini
Incarceration clouds the count of days,
Mouse morsels of repugnant, filthy food
Like islands that above the swamp do raise
A patch of respite from the marshy mood;
Som unkempt wreck,
Ladder’d stockings tatter’d
Pre-modern Mrs Shrek, Amy’s looks were shatter’d,
As quarter-humans mill’d about
This miserable abyss
The shriek, the scrike, the scream, the shout
Grumbl’d with halitosis
She’d had her toenails rough-torn out
Coughing tuberculosis,
Felt Amy desp’rate denizen of Hell…
Then came the change, one sunday night appell,
“Among thee whom have agents proved…
Yes, you… you… come with me
To be removed, to be re-roov’d
By Hitler’s own decree,
All of your spies shall learn your fates some place in Germany
Fresnes
October
1944
Hungarian Questions
Shut tight your eyes! See nothing at all!
Turn yet paler! And, resigned,
Throw your arms around a greater cross!
Florbela Espanca
Hoffa tries to broker a sep’rate peace,
His rats shall leave the sinking Axis ship,
Hitler’s furies fresh treacheries release,
Sending reserves to reaffirm his grip,
Motor’d across
Pannonia’s wide Plain,
Racing t’avert the loss of all that blood & grain.
At Captain Skorzeny’s command
The auld citadel attack’d,
Thro’ weaking guards his elite band,
Passage pecking schmeissers hack’d,
He strode upright, took Hoffa’s hand,
“Your statement you’ll retract…”
Then gave a speech when all the shooting ends,
“We are not enemies but loyal friends.”
“Hungary fights to the finish!”
Faith restored Zapolyan,
“We have one wish, your Jew rubbish…”
Hoffa leant at Eichmann…
“You must return them all to me for their expurgation!”
Budapest
October
1944
(AA) Gl’Immortali VI
The great, the jewel & the mother of all battles
Saddam Hussein
Superhero
The world presents a strange sight:
The vision’s mantle is torn apart—
May valour struggle with the waves if it must
Allama Muhammad Iqbal
A hero born in freedom stalks the Earth –
From the Harbour of Americana,
Sails Captain Amazing to prove true worth,
For action prim’d, full flush with youth-vigour,
Across the waves
To isles of rotting wood
Which Bishamon enslaves, which Kraken drains of blood.
Upon a beach me made skyfall,
The trees made midnight rustle,
He took a cautious starlight stroll,
Til camst he on thick muscle,
So large it seem’d a mighty wall –
Twas throbbing tentacle
Bulging upon the profits of the theft
A sabre swing that slimy limb-length cleft!
One part grows limp the other creams
The face of Amazing
Thick scarlet streams, while distant screams,
& the flailing shaking
Of shorn & bloody sinew-spurt at tyranny’s breaking!
Pacifica
Pendulum Point
I have followed narrow twisting ridges,
Sharp-topped & jagged as a broken crosscut saw
Across the roof of all the Elk-world
Gary Snyder
Blue Polevik pursued by Valkyries
Into a titan forest over ground
Amidst the trees they’ll hear the sobbing cries
Of something strange, what makes that doleful sound;
Lesky! Lesky!
With bulging eyes outspann’d
Astonished Valkyries sink into its quicksand.
Thus Polevik comes safely to
The country of the Ice King,
Naught but a wide, white waste in view,
Where his calls went echoing,
But now a swan of turquoise huie
Swoops down to snatch the ring
Out of his hand, flown to the citadel
Where stirs his icy highness, just as well
For daemons swarm around Pyerun
To deal the killer blow
Standing upon a lake frozen
Beneath the covrant snow
The Ice King yells, the lake’s pane cracks, drags daemon hordes below…
Edge of Asia
Under Aetna
I thought that I could not be hurt
I thought that I must surely be
impervious to suffering
Sylvia Plath
Retreating to the Cyclopean isle
Mars commands Vacuna & Bellona
To fortify the shores; where, from the Nile
Enemies, toxic as belladonna
Bang like iron
Against the sea-sands, slam
King Arthur, his Lion, Hino & Uncle Sam!
Spreads combat yon the coastal wall
With all of its bangs & knocks
For Mars it did not help at all
When the Cyclopes pick’d up rocks
& at him flung them, bowling ball,
Whose skittlescattershocks
This God of War did fluster, blusterly,
Rocks wrecking trench & ramparts lustily!
Mars forc’d to flee this mean assault
“Scylla & Charybdis
Shall surely halt them… with a vault
Leapt, Lion, the abyss;
Where souls of anguish’d sailors languis’d listless with a hiss!
Ausonia
Two Lords
Young as yet the world must be
All our long, long history
Still is but its cradle song
Henrik Wegeland
Well, as far as sublimity’s concern’d,
When brute & sullen war is deified
Lord Bishamon, of all sword-honours earn’d
Commands a claim that cant’ be overturn’d
With backs whip-crack
Three Wyvrn take to air
Jabberwocky hunch-back’d, to take attacks elsewhere.
At once he heard the howl that hiss’d
Turn’d to the sound with a scowl
From out the swaying stalks & mist
Perch’d on a pounding peafowl
Lord Katrikeya flung a fist
& spear to disembow’ll,
A lucky weave & death’s eye flah’d right past
Now Bishamon & Vishnu’s business clash’d.
Among that spearstick scorpistorm
Pagoda blocks the blows,
In fight & form, both mighty Rome
Keeping each other’s toes,
Til’, with all force exhausted, Lord Bishamon’s fail-hood grows.
India
Under Alba
With sacrosanct cajoleries
And starry treachery of your eyes,
Tempt us back to Paradise
Francis Thompson
As Agnorona, bound, her whispers seal’d
To utter Rome’s eternal name forbade
Gaz’d on the Palatine, her instinct steel’d,
There stood a ‘last stand’ bastion, Mars made;
Janus, twin-fac’d,
Closes the temple door,
To which the Aesir rac’d & open-yank’d by Thor.
As every opinion
Dost have its counter, valid,
Mars, & his purple minion,
Turns scaly, pale & pallid,
As when the heights of Guinnion,
By Gala’s valley hid
No more, to war went Arthur, like the dat
He bore St Mary’s icon to the fray.
On seeing she, Jesus-serene,
Mars, at last, hath wilted,
With acid spleen Thor flees the scene,
Like a lover jilted,
As with a creak the scales of right & wrong for Justice tilted!
Ausonia
Stone to Dust
There was a corpse outside
It was a fine and cruel noose
coming out the corpse’s mouth
Ramón Palomares
Mars mumbles homewards to Olympus Mount,
Wounds attended by prancing succubi,
From magic flute the notes of loving fount,
From luscious Venus with a rush of sigh;
Softly seduced
She guides him from the war,
With one kiss were reduced Bellona & Ishtar.
Odin withdrew to Valhalla,
Multitudinous the throng,
Brought the Aesir all together,
Speaking truths with wounded tongue,
“From both East & West comes terror,
Our time will not be long,
Step before me captains of each legion
That march’d not east to subjugate Pyerun!”
He turn’d unto that troop of horse,
The pale, white, black & red,
“Take thee swift course to fetch a force
That stands in the good stead
Of our friend Lord Satanus…” hard hooves to their Master sped.
Asgard
Gargantua
Marble walls of palaces,
Iron bars of dungeons,
You break through them all
Alter Esselin
Dragonsflight bares the brunt of the Gryphon,
Below their fight, embattl’d in the surf,
Celtic braves war for noble Gwyddion,
All glory-worthy roaring to the turf;
Sam’s martial star
Emblazon’d on his tank,
Puffing a fat cigar for how Hell’s legions stank.
Gunshafts shell-after-shell did throw
To invert & invalid,
Sam drove his tanks into a foe
Of flesh-hood foul & acrid,
Be-elzebub survey’d the show
All worried & well hid,
A message from his master brings relief,
“Return to Hell…” joyous, in disbelief,
Sam smiled as his enemy flees,
View sweetening the veins,
Archangel breeze Saint Denys frees
From her barbaric chains,
“Pyerun awaits our armies, come we march to Asgard’s plains.”
Gaul
For Liberty
No subject for immortal verse –
That we who lived by honest dreams
Defend the bad against the worse
Cecil Day Lewis
Between the mists that cloak immortal spheres
& realms of aether soak’d illuminous,
The twinkling of a candelabrum nears,
Behold, the city, ever glorious!
O’erall sate Jove
In regal diety,
While singing angels wove gimcrack’d marqueterie.
The highest hordes of Heaven glow,
Pure & perfect was the path
To the foot-hills of Vesuvo,
To Babababagorath;
Seven heads leave off Averno,
Seven tongues spit serpent-wrath,
At Seraphim, whose bows of golden fires
Loose arrows – thro’ Hells gates the Beast retires.
Towards the long, horn’d, thick-scal’d tale
Gabriel took keen aim,
A whoosh, a wail, a gushing flail,
The Dragon maim’d & lame…
Angels smear’d in its dragonsblood, then stepp’d into the flame.
Hell
Defeating Valhalla
Rally around to the glory of our time!
The blood surges in our veins,
We die for the sake of our land
Aboul-Qacem Echebbi
The young Aesir in battlegear assemble,
Take to the air on flying manticores,
Soaring rainbow streaks that so resemble
Swarming storms of orbital meteors;
Wave after wave
Of old Asgard’s heroes
Rush to a second grave where Pyerun’s sylph-suit glows.
From Heaven, Saint Volodomyr
Flew down with angelic guard,
FEAR floated thro’ the rude Aesir;
Men’s panicking minds fresh marr’d
By Barbarossa’s disappear,
Down the road to Asgard –
Protected by Satanic riders four,
The battle left to all who fought with Thor.
The twisting saint sweeps down & spurns
Thor’s sky-twisting weapon –
Mjolnir returns, but handle burns,
Dropp’d like relay baton,
Arms-naked Thor’s heart pierced by blades deepest plunged by Pyerun.
Asia
(AA) Canto 55: Year Six
**************************************
Know thy self, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories
Sun Tzu
Brutal Reunions
I have nae will to sing or danse
For fear of England & of France
God send them sorrow & mischance
Sir Richard Maitland
Effective sermons of never-say-die
Fuel Yeo’s soul flame, whose prison dirts
Penetrate skin; a gape of open sky,
Outside at last ! with seventeen, alerts
Appear’d like puffs,
Of smoke about his brain
Conjoin’d by ankle cuffs, them bundl’d in a train.
As down the carriage, cumbersome,
Rough nudg’d, him & seventeen,
Yeo observes the face of some
Woman – back in Golders Green
They’d discuss’d with optimism,
Leaving the old routine,
Adventures rending the rest of the war…
Now Aimee Gardner’s chain’d, like him, who swore
She never would be caught… thro’ France
Pass, they, friendly faces,
Still, start, advance, until the dance
At the change of races,
Yon Maginot’s & Siegfried’s stringing beads of hostile bases.
Saarbrucken
October
1944
Saint Aimee
A white stone half-dug into the soil,
Said to me as I was passing by:
– God bless you, pray, I’m a tombstone
Azim Souyun
For thirty-six hours their train has sat
On some side track, just waiting for its turn,
Inside all prisoners can do is chat,
But silence clamm’d by thirsty words which burn;
Angels appear
Like Saint Philip’s daughter,
Eutychis, “Keep alive…” sliding pales of water,
They haul’d them from a cistern pot
Crawling beneath the windows,
Elsewise all of them might be shot,
As each droplet rebestows
The vim of life, from sunk to trot
As acqua vitae flows,
What words of reassurance left the lips
Of those fair spirits – once again there grips
Determination strength to raise
Yeo’s is returning
Squeez’d firm his fist out from the mist
Of madness, saw burning
The torch of hope that tops the slippy slopes of grope & churning.
Bad Kreuznach
October
1944
Death of Aimee Gardner
Dear, beauteous Death, the jewel of the just,
Shining nowhere but in the dark,
What mysteries do lie beyond thy dust
Henry Vaughan
Another halt, this time a diff’rent stir,
& Aimee was unshackl’d from the rest,
Usher’d outside, lined up, awaiting there
A dozen rifles pointed at her chest;
Fate’s sudden wrench,
This could not be mistook,
Thought thoughts, she, just in French, enough to fill a book!
Strength-whisper-words softly exchang’d,
Were winds on which the finches
Flew one last time; the rifles rang’d
Against them; knuckle clenches
The trigger – finger friction chang’d,
Out of diamond dentures,
A solid order roar’d for men to “SHOOT!”
the dozen bullets flew, slew absolute.
Drops Aimee in her final thoughts…
Family was smiling,
A memory of sand & sea
Upon brainwaves piling,
Lurches towards oblivion’s desolate beguiling.
Wachtersbach
October
1944
Autumnal Blood
Should the worst come to the worst
Should we be overpowered by our foes.
Our bodies shall lie on the field of battle
Mangaia
Eisenhower clutches his purple hearts,
With Axis soldiers murder’d as they stood,
Rapid progress reduced to fits & starts,
Bogg’d down by Autumn’s dirge of rain & mud;
Most precious oil
Trickles from port to front,
As onto German soil the first assault troops shunt.
Thou art Hell, once verdant Hurtgen,
Thy primeval forestry,
Watches lion dedication,
Men embattl’d dev’lishly,
The German spirit’s bolster’d iron,
Flaking young-gun Yankee;
Harsh-fated rules amidst thine ancyent bark,
The going brutal & the killing dark.
Each liquid roads, each pile of snow,
Each booby-trap ambush,
Has stemm’d the flow, strange vertigo
Dizzies the Allied push;
His front safe-clos’d Hitler withdraws the Panzers in a hush.
Ardennes
November
1944
Redistributions
The dissipation of feature,
The manifestation of skull,
The lengthening of cheek
George Bruce
Just yesterday was Yeo’s fate interr’d
In hell’s own guts, but feels an age ago,
Sepulchral rows of spectral faces gurn’d,
the antiphon of loneliness bestow;
Firm lock’d within,
No questions to be ask’d
Obeying, with a grin, whatever he’s been task’d.
Rot yellow comes in sticky streams,
Sores purulently oozing,
Dung carted off by ‘being’ teams
Of whom some used as amusing
Torture clowns, appalling screams
On all eardrums bruising
& only one way, one day, all will leave
That’s up the chimney – I do not believe
This is my fate, claims Yeo, still,
Remembering his vow
To grind the mill, unwind his will
Survive no matter how,
To reach the finish line & with a flourish take a bow.
Buchenwald
November
1944
A New Mission
The sun sips the sky until it is drowning.
I am circling my prey.
If I am strong, the world will finally let us be.
Kamikaze Death Poem (anon.)
The Japanese air officer appears
Afore young pilots fresh-faced & alive,
“We’re looking for some special volunteers
To fly a mission no-one could survive:
One possible
Answer of three impart,
‘No,’ ‘Yes,’ & ‘Yes, I volunteer with all my heart.’”
Taken aback them were, of course,
Who’d wanna be a gonner?
But when night fell, floods forth in force,
Thought-phantoms of dishonour;
His mother’s tears, his father hoarse,
“Why bestow this on her?
A coward for a son!” in fitful dreams
Apocalyptic visions stuff’d with screams.
Out of the forty who awoke
“Yes…” answer’d thirty-nine,
The other bloke they push & poke,
While forming in a line,
Zeletic alcestissians for Yosukini’s shrine.
Tokyo
December
1944
The Last Wolf
Ez for war, I call it murder,-
There you hev it plain an’ flat;
I don’t want to go no durder
James Russel Lowell
A fleet of thirty Lancasters takes flight,
Cocksuring with latest technology,
When wee computers, supporting bombsight,
Keen-measuring wind-speed velocity;
The sixth hour nears,
Below – in Tromsoe fiord –
The matchstick ship appears, each pilot pulls the cord,
Dropping bombs ever precisely
On the long-sought for Tirpitz,
Who shudders with Hellish fury
Neath an unrelenting blitz,
This fairest princess of the sea
Struck by convulsive fits,
Slipping into the icy, bubbling foam –
Above, applauding Britons turn for home.
This last pride of the High Seas Fleet
Lies, rust-meat, under waves –
Awful, complete, total defeat,
Dead in their ocean graves,
This challenge to Brittania ends like Trojan architraves.
Norway
Dec 12th
1944
The End of the Affair
When I was a young shoot & curious
my heart was set on this world;
my evil deeds will make me die soon
Palau
Twyx keen lambitus & deft fellatrice
Two lovers groan in gushes, while outside
Shuffle shadow beings until decease,
Monotonous, inescapable ride!
With coital flame
Slowing with fierce fondling
They go to play the game of sonderbehandling.
Anna Grunfeld stood a statue
As dawdle her inspectors
Along the lines, where two-by-two,
Arbitary, capricious,
The weakest lookers pay their due
In this evil, viscious
Infestation of every human sin,
When ‘special treatment’ just a rubbish bin!
The two new vernals caught her eye,
She had her wicked way,
A startl’d cry, a heartfelt, “why
Touch Juden filth, & gay!
This trysting is kaput!” hiss’d the disgusted Mengele.
Auschwitz
December 16th
1944
Battle of the Bulge
Let the shell fragments
howl past more often,
random death roam free
Sergey Narovchatov
The Allies stand at Germany’s threshfold,
Hitler denudes defences in the East,
Inspires his troops with the gusto of old,
Once more the grand gods of battle may feast!
Thro’ the Ardennes
Trail miles of martial queues,
Fresh aircraft, tanks & men, “To Antwerp & the Meuse!”
Fog drowns the leaves, the ice breeze chills,
Vee-Twos trail fiery blazes,
Thro’ twisted vales, ‘neath snow-capt hills,
Trundle hundreds of panzers,
No vernal cluster’d Daffodils
Comforting the soldiers
Attacking tanks cunctatorially –
How different from triumphal ‘forty.
The petrol dumps are blown sky high,
Fury’s depleted use,
Their fumes suck’d dry the Panzers sigh
Beside the milky Meuse,
Yearning for famous victory, alas the Fates refuse.
Dinant
December 22nd
1944
(AA) Canto 56: The Rage of War
**************************************
What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy
Mahatma Gandhi
Poker Game
How did you pass thro’ cobalt wood
Thro’ shrouds of white, to reach the sneer
Where fat hyenas feast on blood
Amjad Nasser
Yuletide passes by & yet no victor;
Saint Nicholas delivers golden gift
To the Allies, the skies gleam clear weather,
Reflected by the bright, white snowsome drift;
Farenheit’s fall,
The GI grows colder,
Shouts, “Fire in the hole!” Angels on his shoulder
Go about their deadly business,
Wreaking murder far below,
Piles of presents sent for Christmas
Lie unopened in the snow,
For nearby these frozen corpses
These gifts will never know
As all about the Fuhrer’s grand design
But a spent promise broken on the line.
All-in for the Fascist menace,
Three aces… world grows hush,
Hitler’s grimace, the other ace
Flipp’d for a royal flush,
The Allies claim the bulging pot, upon three sides now push.
France
December 27th
1944
For Japan!
We didn’t see our dead,
Who rarely bothered coming home to die
But simply stayed away out there
Howard Nemerov
How light the hearts of men summon’d to die,
The time to please the Emperor soon come,
Pride forms blue spinning crystals in the eye,
Serene as the floating chrysanthemum;
From Kyushu
To Soya-Misaki,
Tojo’s warmongers drew their lethal infantry;
Then pour’d them thro’ the harbour quays
Filling the honeycomb caves,
The Kimigayo on the breeze
Superpatriotic braves
Heard strange whisperings in the trees
As mad kannushi raves,
Ambitious lilies adventing the storm,
Not long to go before the war comes home.
Basho climb’d gorgeous Mount Shuri,
Open’d his heart & pray’d
For victory, his great army
Snoozed in the evening shade,
Waiting to be awoken & to draw the Empire’s blade.
Okinawa
January 1st
1945
Death of Frau Stemmler
Within our life these sorrows we contain
Uncertain days, yet full of certain grief;
In number few, yet infinite in pain
Christopher Lever
Karolina gazed on beautiful spires,
Medieval majesty up-streaming,
Untouch’d by this damn’d war’s destructive fires,
The World of old all dazzling & dreaming;
Her cousin Klaus
Meets her at the station,
Soon in a coffehaus flows good conversation.
Bligh flew over Franconia
Where the targets drew in sight,
Dyak temple of Der Fuhrer
One moment before midnight,
From the belly of his bomber
Drops the poor people’s plight…
A grey deluge of terror from the skies,
Frau Stemmler cursed Herr Hitler as she dies.
As ghastly Magdeburg suffer’d
This city too knows hell,
Bligh glides his bird & at the word
Load added to the swell,
A far cry from gallant ‘forty this slaughter ariel.
Nuremburg
Jan 2nd
1945
The Anonymous Soldier
I find no peace, & all my war is done,
I fear & hope, I burn, & freeze like ice.
I fly above the wind, yet can I not arise
Sir Thomas Wyatt
In a storm, in a blizzardsong of snow,
A soldier huddles from a distant land,
Where purple sands of desert heave & blow,
& nomads drink the vines of Samarkand;
This frozen waste,
This landscape alien,
Encas’d the great displac’d races of gravesent men.
They knew him thro’ the regiment,
Tho’ none his name remember’d,
A shell, of elevation spent,
Beside his neck descended,
& blew up like a lava vent,
Cruelly dismember’d
His torso stood upon two bleeding knees,
Legs in the bushes, arms up in the trees.
Once he was his mother’s darling,
But now he’s blown to bits
Cursing the King of Everything,
The Devil’s glamourglitz,
Lock’d in wars of Good & Evil, when Destiny permits.
Russia
January
1945
Coffee & Cigars
In a Wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die
Lewis Carroll
As France was swept with sunshine breaking forth
From Winter’s night with all the joy of dawn,
Redoubtable Pendragon of the North –
To some archangel, other’s demonspawn -,
By armour’d train
Crept to the rendezvous
With Monty, ever vain, but still his best, he knew.
They met for coffee & cigars
Churchill insisted puffing,
“It seems the mighty roar of Mars
Reduced to hoarsey huffing,
The Battle of the Bulge’s scars,
& his army’s roughing,
Has chasten’d Eisenhower…” Monty smil’d,
“He gets our strength is unity concil’d,
We’ve come a long way haven’t we?”
The both of them agreed,
By air & sea & land did free
The banded British breed
Spun on a moral sixpence from packhorse to plated steel.
Brussels
January 5th
1944
Karmic Echoes
O mother!
Weep for thy noble dead;
They fought like heroes till they fell
James Nicol
Zhukov emits the order of the day –
Pamphlets, loudspeakers, all along the line
Remember those who fell along the way -,
‘On those who did us torture let divine
Retribution
Seek them with no pity…’
Mouths full of ablutions, prickspur lethality
In fatal blows did close, embroil
The Wehrmacht with disaster;
HER sandal-foot steps onto soil,
The scales of fate HER master,
Watching a single soldier toil
As the Russians pass’d her –
Surrounding some German in their net,
Surrendering at point of bayonet.
In Shlisselburg he’d shar’d stare-eyes,
“Just shoot him!” “No, stop, no!,”
A Russian cries, “tho’ you despise
Him I must let him go!”
“But why?” “I cannot quite explain…” smiles KARMA in the snow.
January 6th
Szolnok
1945
Defeating the Wehrmacht
‘Tis true, ’tis day; what though it be?
O wilt thou therefore rise from me?
Why should we rise, because ’tis light?
John Donne
Men shuffled thro’ the snow with frozen feet,
Beshawl’d as hags, thick whiskers wire & grey,
The gamble fail’d, an army in retreat,
Avoiding another bloody Cannae;
As in the East,
To the cruel Katyusha,
Hordes of Russkis releas’d across the Vistula.
It was less offensive action,
More the milt’ry parade,
As Berlinwards marches Russian
With the Saragozan maid,
Narr’eyed avengers talion
Primal instinct obey’d,
Zhukov commands the Mazovian plain,
The Wolf’s Lair now diminish’d of Wolfsbane.
With freedom of the world at stake,
With Wolves of war abroad,
Riding the Snake the Russians take
The Moscow-Berlin road,
Racing on hated enemies to put them to the sword.
Warsaw
Jan 12th
1945
New Normal
What is’t to toil amidst the din of war,
To talk of honour, or a dreadful fear,
To live on hope, the shadow’d best we have
Joseph Badworth
A rumbling drone, reminiscent of Hell
Grows louder when the front lines sag & crack,
Posnaniensis desolately dwell
Where roads of Reich & progress cul-de-sac;
Shop windows all
Display fray’d cardboard goods
While on the farmer’s stall just sickly looking spuds.
The solitary cafe sold
Ersatz unpalatable
The only cinema did hold
Heimatfilms sentimental
This last one now some three months old
But life had grown so dull
That still to these unheated seats they drift
To watch again with friends when ends the shift.
As one departs the populace –
By handcart, horse & hand
Pans, mattresses, sacks, suitcases
Plod in a gypsy band,
Sie gaben ihr leben for Fuhrer, Volk & Vaterland
Posen
17th January
1945
Bastards
We are very slightly changed
From the semi-apes who ranged
India’s prehistoric clay
Rudyard Kipling
This War’s final dramas know no pity,
Satanical eupraxia all sides,
Effluviums of mass’d virility
Swarms from the east to sieze its nightly brides;
Libidos thrust
On peach-ripe alabasters
Eyes like spring skies ’til lust claws girls to their ‘masters.’
Thro’ cellars, barns, the came in queues,
Deflower’d ev’ry petal,
Stenching of cigarettes & booze –
Under each boiling kettle
This harrowing from hell renews,
When the harsh pains settle
Some bled to death, some hang themselves from trees,
Some sang a heimatlider on raw knees.
& some shall bear a bastard child,
Eyes so slightly slanted,
One mother styl’d her night defil’d
That her boy implanted –
Her little miracle of that lifetime’s wish Godgranted.
Wartheland
January
1944
(AA) Canto 57: Deliberations
**************************************
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
(AA) Canto 58: Iwo Jima
**********************************
Where have our air forces and battleships gone? Are we to lose? Why don’t they start operations? We are positively fighting to win, but we have no weapons. We stand with rifles and bayonets to meet the enemy’s aircraft, battleships, and medium artillery
Toshihiro Oura
Assault Force
I took his dripping corpse upon
my dolphin back & reached the strand;
the beast played saviour to the man
Antiphilus of Byzantium
Across the Irrawaddy Britain shunts,
The USA reclaims the Philippines,
The Emperor retreating on all fronts,
Outbuilt in tanks, planes, ships & submarines;
Despite such might
Japan still unsurpass’d
When gunjin bravely fight, fight to their very last.
Across this vast Pacific flows
The Taskforce 51,
Who, sight assembl’d, only shows
This war will always be won
In the wake of great crescendos
Each battleship gun
Deals dose of morning’s shellfire for the cause…
Converging on Mount Suribachi’s shores
H-Hour hath come, the barges crowd
The Ocean gushes calm,
Unbrave, unproud, his helmet bow’d,
His rifle round his arm
A clerk from Albuquerque works thro’ the twenty-third psalm.
Off Iwo Jima
February 19th
1944
Deadly Enemies
A naked picture of surrealist
Beauty in eerie stumps,
& ancient banyans
Mmoe Malietoa Von Reiche
At any moment now a foot shall stand
on the soil – uninvited – of Japan,
Or sand, rather, two miles of it, as land
The first brave wave, who, happy to a man
Sense all is still,
As if in empty kirk,
Nobody left to kill, the guns had done their work.
The crystal beach volcanic, black,
Felt like a wheat bin’s dipping,
No traction offer’d the attack,
As backwards men kept slipping,
Then… with a jolting thunderwhack,
All Hell went let-ripping –
As bullets flew & streaming mortars scream’d,
Some firework Mount Suribachi seem’d.
The beach explodes in fits of ‘fuck’,
An army caught mid hop,
As jeep & truck & troops get stuck,
‘Twas more the butcher’s shop,
As when fog cleared from off the rocky tops of Spion Kop
Red Beach One
February 19th
1944
Death of John Basilone
on the ramparts,
he never said death is to be preferred,
that life is negotiable
Abba Kovner
In face of fear, one’s training is our fuel,
But Basilone oozed pure talent, flaunted
Gifts beyond that beach; a personal duel,
A one-man rampage machine, undaunted,
While mortar shells
& hell-hail did death’s work,
As when the Dardanelles defended by the Turk.
As John, quite single handedly,
Destroyed blockhouses freely
Upon a sudden suddenly
His gun-grip slipp’d genteely,
Then body fell down woodenly,
Mumbling some swahili
John last rites whispers, spurting from his veins…
But whose brave deeds an opening obtains.
Probing towards the landing strip
Men penetrate the lines
Whose comradeship, with chipper skip,
These deadliest confines,
Proclaims a vital victory as on them Luna shines.
Airfield #1
February 19th
1945
Peak Storming
I saw the rampart of my native land,
One time so strong, now dropping in decay,
Their strength destroy’d by this new age’s way
Francisco Gómez de Quevedo y Villegas
Commanders acting whack’d out, stoned & drunk,
Tenacity unprecedented halts
The drive to take the beach, bogg’d down with junk,
A wreckage wall reduced to fits & jolts
Flame Throwing tanks
Confer decisive aid
Ascending wooden planks in Schenectady made.
Under the starry Pleiades
Battle brokers at the breach
With efforts rais’d by Herakles
The Marines move off the beach
&, with an isolating squeeze,
The peak’s first rise up reach
But bare a second they could spare to stare,
For hidden gun-holes blaz’d them everywhere.
As, slow & bloody from the base,
Boulder after boulder,
What demons chase this awkward race
To the mountain’s shoulder,
When every single jack of ‘em has aged a decade older.
Mount Suribachi
February 20th
1945
A New Flag
And lands are saved and conquests won,
And the race of high and hard truths run,
And chains snapped off and sins undone
FW Faber
‘Hot Rocks’ surmounted! Stars & Stripes uprose,
Mount Suribachi Yankee now, huge cheers
Erupt, while celebratory salvoes
Let loose by naval captains clinking beers;
As Hellespont
Found Byron in her foam,
Says Forrester, “I want to hang that flag at home.”
“LST 779
Holds a larger flag inside
Sir” – “Well, son, that’ll do just fine
Go & raise that thing with pride
Just make damn sure that first flag’s mine,
So many boys have died…”
Faded his voice into the void of war
“…Well, get to it son, watcha waiting for!?”
Joe Rosenthall was watching on,
Associated Press,
His instinct shone, the Sergeant gone
Him follows on a guess,
Sensing something developing, his camera’s caress.
Yellow Beach
February 23rd
1945
The Best Shot
No one can tell me,
Nobody knows,
Where the wind comes from
A.A. Milne
As one good picture wins & loses wars,
Up they strode to seal this sacred moment
Young image makers defining their cause
In shining sun that by the Gods was sent;
As hill tops shake
With breezes from the sea,
Nobody could mistake, this flag means victory!
As Harold Keller, Schultz & Strank,
With Black & Ira Hayes
& Sousley, men with hefty crank
America’s badge did raise;
Joe snapp’d some shots, the seconds shrank
The Stars & Stripes display
Themselves for all this island, & beyond…
Where, like somebody’d waved a magic wand
Across conviction, as they saw
That image clog the news,
Regal & raw, their eagle’s jaw
Unbroken, saw the queues
For G.I. joining swell immensely, melds esprit de corps!
The Unites States of America
September 24th
1945
Broken Bonds
Dead, they examined him, finding
in his body a greater body
for the soul of the world
Cesar Vallejo
With ‘piece of shit island!’ & ‘geez louise!’
Curses blend with the murders under slopes
Of Suribachi, men from overseas
Shall conquer here, as when the Age of Popes
From Genoa
To Caffa sent out fleets,
Far off to Crimea’s rich Trapezuntine seats.
These were the hardest of the yards
American boys must play,
To stay alive by turn of cards
& survive another day,
Where, thinking free from living guards,
Into a bunker stray,
Two friends, who, since elementary school
Have shar’d each other’s basic molecule.
One foe still lives, toss’s last grenade
Into that friendship’s heart;
Decision made, the elder grade
Leapt on it, blown apart,
His stunn’d pal full of, “cogito, ergo sum’ of Descates.
Minami
February 24th
1944
Labyrinthines
Then twice six followers from the board
Rushed forth with fierce delight;
They whirled the club, they waved the sword
Esaias Tegnér
All in these crevices, tunnels, crags, caves,
Only one time flash from eternity,
Go men & boys, from nervous to too brave,
Whom, gentle once, at their maternity,
Now lives to kill,
Without a second thought,
Pursued, with all the thrill of an Olympic sport!
As napalm, scented sickly-sweet,
Outflying from flaming torches,
To some twas just like grinding meat,
To others crunching roaches,
Oer sundry ridges in the heat
Tarr’d by scarring scorches,
Progress, meter-by-meter, day-by-day,
Drove on this madly dangerous melee.
The airfield gave a mighty cheer,
The bomber ‘Dinah Might’
Did drop & veer, her smoking rear
Was damag’d in the flight
That yesterday had help’d to flatten’d Tokyo all night.
Airfield #1
March 4th
1945
Victory Comes
Where even defeat has pride.
And nothing can vanquish this ancient nation,
That knows how to dance with such ardour and will
Gevorg Emin
From glorious stand in Kitana gorge
Men overwhelm’d by overwhelming force,
With swords of steel that with true zeal would forge
No mercy, no compassion, no remorse
& no banzai,
By Kuribashi led
Four hundred set to die, all thro’ the darkness spread.
As bullets splutter’d thro’ the zone,
In hacking battle heated,
Loudspeakers squeal beseeching, drone
“Soldiers you are defeated
Surrender & survive…” just stone
Silence – incompleted
That task your emperor had given you,
Now, only death by enemy will do.
The sun rose up & left the sea,
The island calm & still,
The agony, the killing spree,
Has no-one left to kill,
But will live on in nightmares even Dante could not quill.
Okita
March 20th
1944
Mumble Words 