(AA) Canto 23: King Arthur
**************************************
For those who have undertaken the same hard task habitually go far into the past for their themes; some occupy themselves with events a thousand years old, others are ashamed to halt there
Petrarch
Arthur’s Birth
The Cymry will be lamenting
While their souls will be tried
Before a horde of ravagers
Taliesin
Cupbearer! Come & fill these horns of mead
& toast our eager vessels for the song,
Adorn our thought with helmet, spur & steed
& charge with us along the first furlong;
Romanitas
Thro’ Britain has collaps’d,
The cause calamitous, Barbarian relapse.
With Henghist came the Saxon stock
That is forever England,
The Britons suffer such crude shock
Both Pendragons understand,
This weather-change wears to the rock
The soil of this fair land –
Best fields them yielding year-on-bloody-year,
Yearning for some messiah to appear.
Such wishes Heaven understood
As to Tintagel drew
A force for good, rich Pictish blood
Wee babelet courses thro,’
From lovers’ born in moonlit tryst, when kisses taste of dew!
Cornwall
478
Arthur the Warrior
Legend has it
That within the chalice
Was an elixir of courage
Kimolisa Mings
Burning with the Caracallan edict,
Lamenting how his motherlands were torn,
Earth-sent to show each Saxon, Scot & Pict
The purpose & the reason he was born;
Our young hot-head
Ascending thro’ the ranks,
Prays nightly by his bed, sending sweet Christus thanks!
As the river was his border
There an inch he never gave,
Fighting battles in good order,
Mettle tests Orestes-brave,
Each battle’s night he pour’d a
Libation for the grave
Of Geraint, still alive inside his blade –
Until, at last, the Saxon forces fade.
King Erbin granted Arthur leave
To seize himself good lands,
“Son, to achieve this feat believe
Men’s fate lies in men’s hands;”
“My Lord,” said Arthur, kneeling, as decorum’s lilt demands.
South Cadbury
506
Camelot
Ten different kinds of birds I have identified
By their calls & songs as we sit here
Under a darkening sky of June, drinking our wine
John Heath-Stubbs
Lord Arthur made a tour of new lands won,
Finding a ruin’d Roman city there,
But not so rough, & when the tough work done
His capital grew famous everywhere;
A noble court
To serve a nobler king,
A place for days of sport & nights of lovemaking!
As labia his lips enclose,
Like lillies kiss a river,
Her goblet-naval’d belly rose
Like aspens all a-shiver
On mountain winds; she curls her toes,
Thanks her pleasure giver,
His touch to her was ointment pouring forth
Upon strawberries wilding in the North.
Now comes his love, love caliph-fierce,
Love quick’ning blow-by-blow,
Broad blade thrusts pierce, he raids her ears,
As serendip, in tow,
Draws tantric, velvet magic thro’ heroic libido.
Virocolum
507
Guinevere
Sae, in my heid as birdsang
Faas throu simmer treen
Is the thocht o my luve
Sydney Goodsir Smith
A marriage of remembrance, & the dance!
Him stag & she a panther, as they tore
Across the merrie courtyard, such romance
Has never since been seen, or seen before;
From Delilah
Stroking brave Samson’s head,
To Julius Ceasar in Cleopatra’s bed.
Alas, as Ceasar soon replaced
By his ‘friend’ Mark Anthony,
Queen Guinevere was daily faced
By a young knight in her e’e,
Whose peach-soft lips she long’d to taste,
An Absalon was he,
& in his dreams he, too, spent nights with her,
Broken by morning’s birdsong’s warning burr.
Feigning distance nonchalantly
They knew it in their core,
As wifely she a family
To Arthur’s bloodline bore,
She wish’d that good Sir Lancelot was hers for evermore.
Castle Knucklas
509
Love & Lust
This war!
I am tired
of a husband who never sleeps
Chenjerai Hove
More regions yield to Arthur’s sceptre-sway,
Saint Dyfig crowns him king ‘neath Llandaff spire,
The Cymry all united in a day,
Happy partners in a happy empire;
Thro’ giftery,
Perstoic shows of force,
& gentle foe-amis, his reign shall run long course.
Young Mordred gambols round the court,
Arthur his foster father,
Scribes sacred scriptures daily taught
But this young scamp would rather
Practice at sword-play, well he fought
Other boys much older
& slaying one he pleaded innocent,
“Twas accident!” Medrawt knew different.
He wander’d into mountain hush,
Out collecting spiders,
The gasp… groan… gush…. of lovers rush
Spying naked riders,
The loins of Lancelot enqueen’d, squeezing apple ciders.
Powys
514
The Death of Lancelot
Oh what pain it is to part !
Can I leave thee, can I leave thee ?
O what pain it is to part
John Gay
Things said on the road are heard in the grass,
King Arthur broods upon his rough disgrace,
“Such scandal here shall never come to pass
& of this deep betrayal leave no trace…
But first I must…
Must I? Yes, I must see
Her breasts of devil lust, her nest of treachery.”
The next time Guinevere steps took
On love’s illicit meeting,
Follow’d was she out to that nook
By yew trees & ewe bleating,
There gave she Lancelot that look
Ah! twas all too fleeting,
As Arthur watch’d on, face as grey as ash,
The lovers were arrested in a flash.
In agonies his best knight died,
Whose blood did gloop & gush,
“Come back to bed, naught shall be said,
Died, he, in an ambush,
& shall be buried hon’rably…” Her hopes! Her heart! Her crush!
Powys
514
The Battle of Mount Badon
Oh, you, warriors,
For the people, be the vanguard.
Without resting day or night
Dài Jìtáo
As druid’s epics never write themselves,
For to avenge the exile of King Caw,
Against King Drustan’s pack of Pictish Elves
& for his mother’s blood-right he shall war;
the Gorsgodd rides,
Three hundred nobles strong,
Upon those restless tides which elevate this song.
The sun had not yet took his throne,
With golden paint applying,
Before hot blood & blocks of bone
Sent through the battle flying,
The battle done by early morn,
Hundreds dead & dying,
A thousand prisoners, all in a line
Of Picts, depress’d, the dragon’s limping spine.
King Arthur drew his Hittite blade
& cut a thousand throats,
While Clerics prayed, as Delphi made
Blood sacrifice of goats,
To please the gods, to please HIS god, to hell each shade demotes.
Lammer Law
516
Camlann
The bull, conversing with nature.
Moves off into the meadow,
White horns planted
Nikolai Alekseevich Zabolotsky
The best part of two hundred thousand men
Have come to share this dreich & dreary space,
A floating moor above Dunnichen glen,
The hunter & the hunted at the chase;
Weakening eyes
Dividing men three-fold,
“Sire, is that very wise?” “Sir Kai, do as ye’re told.”
Merlin sat silent oer the scene
From Rheged he had wandered,
At bardic school, barely nineteen,
On poetry had ponder’d,
Oer murder ghastly & obscene
Somebody had blunder’d,
For Arthur was failing his final test,
This mad, dim, weird, grim battle of the West.
Mordred espies his ‘family,’
With heart-beat scenting blood,
Cross combat he, bearbeitely,
Ghosted beneath his hood,
Then shook a knife thro’ Arthur’s ribs & dropp’d him where he stood.
Dunnichen
537
Death of Arthur
Then say, as his divine embrace
Destroys the mortal parts of you
I too am of that royal race
A.D. Hope
What good a kingdom when a life force fades?
What use are riches when your end is near?
What help is power when we join the shades?
What use remorse when one can shed no tear?
Death, dark & dread,
Lay cold bones upon him,
So very nearly dead, light winch’d in ever dim.
As gravity dictates our end,
When precipices crumble,
”Sir Bedevere,” he gasp’d, “Old friend,”
Throat horsey, hoar & humble,
”My blade with thee I do intend,
Do not fudge or fumble,
But in that lake o’er there it ye must throw,
Never let it be clutch’d by Saxon foe.
For while it stays unhidden there
Our souls they shall not rule…”
A gulp of air, an angel stare,
Beard spittl’d in red-drool,
King Arthur dies, his famous blade lobb’d in that flaming pool
Inchyra
537
(AA) Canto 24: Deepening Wounds
**************************************
If I ever smell of a Resurrection, or come a second time on Earth, I will pray God to make me born in England, the Land of Liberty
Montesquieu
Kick-Back Peace
That ancient tree, don’t let it fall
Until old age is knelling;
So many things it can recall
Hans Christian Andersen
The spirit of King Arthur is at stake,
Churchill declares his strivance to restore
To France her liberty, like Francis Drake
Preparing for Armada by the shore;
Kenning, again,
Just as when Bonaparte
Defeated was in Spain, there shall his fight-back start.
Gibraltar was the vital key
To Suez & to empire,
To lose Madrid’s neutrality
Would be devastatic dire,
Thus bribes were plann’d painstakingly
To meet each man’s desire –
Franco’s own brother & top generals
Suddenly invested in minerals,
Then from Swiss bank accounts brand-new,
Lapp’d up London’s largesse,
As agents flew each one withdrew
Two million or less,
& crocks the Fascist Latin bloc’s abortive obsolesce.
Zurich
September
1940
The Living Blitz
My precious life I spent considering
What I should eat in summer, wear in spring.
Vile belly ! take the crust ! tis crust ! ’tis nobler food
Sa’di
As sirens fire, up to his office roof,
For visions halieutic Norman climbs,
He’d lost too much at cards, so rose aloof
From crude & clutter’d fleshpits of these times;
As was his right,
Special immunity,
Felt he, death’s chances sleight in such a vast city.
Perusing London’s ‘Bright Young Things,’
Play ‘No Man’s Land’ twyx dances,
Sense-numbing battle slowly brings
Growing insouciances,
Borne stubborn by phlegmatic wings,
Tea-time in the manses,
As all, through the capital panoply,
Grew calm, as sleep panope in the sea.
“We share such bloodymindedness,
If Hitler thinks we’ll crack,
He’ll find in us the kind that does
Not kowtow to attack,”
Thought Norman as his cautious chauffer roll’d into the back.
London
October 1st
1940
Destiny of War
Cut him off. He can take care
Of himself. Take root in the earth,
Or go hunting with wolves
Charles Simic
Refraining from his guttural bombast
Hitler convers’d calmly over luncheon,
“The season for the sea-invasion pass’d,
We continue the bombing of London…”
Truths sadly aired,
“This war now beckons long,
Tho’ unfully prepared our will shall prove too strong.”
“England” spoke thwarted conqueror,
Cousins willing to admire,
“Has subjugated India
But with superior fire,
Her Raj precursors our Russia…
But… her global empire
Must be destroy’d when all the fighting ends,
When all I wanted was to be their friends.”
“Russia!?” what resipiscent surprise!
“Why yes, it has to be…”
Divining eyes drift to the skies,
“…Our one true enemy,
Whose rabbits must be swiftly slain or chain’d in slavery.”
Berlin
October
1940
Open Neutrality
Thy spirit, Independence, let me share:
Lord of the lion heart & eagle eye,
Thy steps I follow with my bosom bare
Tobias Smollett
As ‘Victory Itself!’ the platform paced,
“How dare this… this… little cuckold be late,
When schemes, without my help, would go to waste!”
In steaming, clanking, came a train of state;
Franco of Apain
descended with a smile,
That smirk’d with a disdainful, strain’d bandito smile.
With podgy face & squeaky voice,
His ally’s presence grated,
“Friend, can there be no other choice,
Our fascist front far-fated?”
At once, the high-pitch’d whine annoys,
Brash & unplacated,
“I cannot let your soldiers march thro Spain
Who want no new Napoleon again.”
“Napoleon!” “Such foreign force
Would only cause unrest,”
A stubborn horse, no change of course
On him the snake impress’d
Despite his wily gaze, left grazing on be-medall’d chest.
Hendaye
October 23rd
1940
Civilian Fightback
I am older & have been far away
In different corners of the world –
I have seen all that I expected
KC Steven
As Big George Foreman threw his very best
By the Congo, at Muhammad Ali,
Then ‘punch’d himself out’ – right hook! comes to rest,
Spreadeagl’d like a toss’d aside dolly;
The Nazis fling
Reaming draining strength
Warpassion weakening, their last must come at length.
In the belly of the barrage,
With battle rattling dentures,
Shunning all shield & camouflage,
Old soldier of the trenches
With his dear wife, their temple Taj,
Shrugs away the wrenches,
When dropping bombs send rubble toppling down,
Crossing the arteries of London Town.
How mellowly these spouses sit
Lunching to sirenwails,
“Names not on it just won’t get hit!”
Again, the Fuhrer fails
To fray the fighting spirit where an Englishman prevails.
Peckham
October
1940
Tiger Frisking
Drizzles surge into deluge, and,
Absorbing mother’s tears of agony
Purl out from prison grills
Varavara Rao
He noticed how the spotted hawks in flight
Pass’d on wide pinions thro’ the lofty air,
To where some steep, untrodden mountain height
Caught the last tresses of the Sun God’s hair;
Leaving the scene
Of Franco’s betrayal
Despite all that has been Franco remains neutral!
His carriage furnish’d lavishly
With the treasures of the Loire,
He rode the Transalpine to see
Marshall Petain at Montoire,
Conducting high diplomacy,
“Will Vichy join the war?”
The Marionette joins the Caudillo
By answering with such ungrateful, “no!”
Thro’ Piedmont he makes his way
To lily Tuscany
Finds Il Duce scripts his own play
“My friend, my grand army
From Albania pours to Epirus & Thessaly.”
Florence
October 28th
1940
Death of Sue Johnstone
Under the searchlights tied
In bows of cellophane,
Your camouflage is night
Geoffrey Dutton
Night falls & yet the pigeon flocks take flight,
Docks shining with an eerie daytime glow,
Up-spurting flames, the stark stench of cordite,
Those flail-a-fall-a rafters row-on-row;
Above them all
Those gutsy herren came,
Relentless to their goal, a capital aflame.
Beyond the bonnie estu’ry,
Yon its looping curvatures,
Each anti-aircraft battery
Pointed accusing fingers,
A bubbling, peasoup cemet’ry,
Devilish defences,
A lottery, & at thy number’s root,
You’d better bag yersel’ a parachute!
Her blazing staircase made her freeze,
The wailing flames arrive,
Upon her knees, thro’ smoke & wheeze,
“At least the kids survive!”
Clutching slow-melting teddy bears, their young mum burnt alive.
Poplar
October
1940
Strange Meeting
As long as the sky whirls
You will be my redemption
And my doom
Reinaldo Arenas
Molotov admired the rich, Reich heartland,
Conducting his formal tours d’horizon,
Von Ribbentrop shook firmly by the hand,
Concealing deftly the escalation;
How plushly lay
That old painter’s study,
Whose helfer sniff’d to say, ‘Velcome to Victory!’
As Vyacheslav faced Der Fuhrer,
He was never overaw’d,
Outspeaking the master speaker,
Show’d his tongue the sharper sword,
“Tell me of this New World Order…
What of your plans abroad…
Stalin is concern’d while court you Finland…
What will come of your duel with England?”
Sirens fumigate the building,
Grey shelter tense with fear,
Explosions ring, awful thudding
Comes scudding ever near,
“Dis var is von!” “Then whose are those & why are we in here?”
Berlin
November 13th
1940
Britannia’s Waves
The sailor’s wives
At Capo le Case
Have sad songs
Paolo Volponi
Among mountain isles of Homer’s musing.
From His Majesty’s ship, ‘Illustrious,’
Swordfish uplift, birds on a double wing,
Black specks against the sunset to the west;
The seas bleed red
Beyond Ionia,
From where beige killers sped to distant Puglia.
As Il Duce’s fleet caught sleeping
By the British planes in rows
Into waves like salmon leaping
Went their famous torpedoes,
Murder & destruction reaping
With rough & violent blows
Destroying with a stalely-sure aplomb
The proud ‘Littorio’ touches bottom.
Two more battleships share ger fate
Three more suffer greatly,
As strange sensations congregate
Thro’ Italy’s psyche,
Faint inklings of disaster for them & Mussolini.
Taranto
November 14th
1940
(AA) Canto 25: Manoueverings
**************************************
Only the dead have seen the end of war
Plato
A New Rome
He had, yet wanted all Releefe.
The Prop & Ruin of the State;
The People’s violent Love & Hate
John Cleveland
The Generalissimo took supper,
Settl’d in his leather with Chianti,
Imagining sat with Calphurnia
Discussing tribal Gaul’s hostility;
His brilliance
Unecho’d in the field,
Valletta’s fine defence offers the meagre yield.
Churchill builds strength in wily stealth –
East of Cyrenaica
The pieces of the Commonwealth
Force Egypt’s ancyent border,
In fiery line & perfect health
To claim an Uttica –
When Italy’s panic-stricken warbands
Flee Bardia & dune-sunk, lunar sands.
Pride-swallowing Mussolini
‘Neath Hitler’s stern voice squirms,
“Fuhrer! help me! my grand army
Rack’d with retreat & worms!”
“Of course, my friend, but in the end it must be on my terms.”
Rome
December
1940
Churchill’s Stoicism
Come bombs, & blow to smithereens
Those air-conditioned, bright canteens,
Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans
John Betjeman
Those fairy-lights which grace Piccadilly
Each Christmas are, this year, black’d-out bomb-rough,
Who’d have thought that war could raze a city,
The shape of things to come comes soon enough;
Up Churchill rose,
In him all hope intern’d,
Thro’ him resistance flows, thro’ him the worm has turn’d.
Aft breaking fast with steak & wine,
He inspects old London town,
Whose passage clapping people line,
A rallying, “Are we down?”
On all sides, “NO!” “We shall be fine!”
“God bless King George’s crown!”
“Whatever Goering hurls us from the air,
We’d rather die in London than despair!”
P.M. returns to pens & lamp,
Still sirens stretch & roar,
The shelter damp, an aide-de-camp
Asks how they’ll win the war,
“Fight on & hope America walks thro’ our open door.”
Whitehall
December 10th
1940
Extravagances
Let them bestow on ev’ry Airth a Limb
Open all my Veins, that I may swim
To Thee my Saviour, in that Crimson Lake
James Graham
As Jodl sits with Hitler by the fire,
He was allow’d, for once, a glass of Scotch,
“Of this skirmish with Engliand, how I tire,
Especially when, upon my own watch,
A monster waits
Slavering to the east
As if infernal gates were prowl’d by growling beast.”
“Russia?” “Of course…””What will you do?”
“Well, invade in ‘forty-one,
For by the fall of forty-two
Our dominance might be gone,
Churchill will make a dirty stew,
Beef’d up by Washington,
You’ve seen how Stalin gobbles lands-on-lands,
Deutschland shall be a part of his demands.”
“A pre-emptive strike…” mus’d Jodl,
“Indeed, the plan quite clear,
A citadel impregnable
Forge from this hemisphere –
& guard Europa’s shores with Schweizergarde halberdier!
Berlin
December
1940
A Daring Escape
I’d sooner sleep on the moor
in a lonely snug hollow
a clump of rush at my side
An Ciaran Mabach
“I must away into the big wide world!”
Sang survivors of the down’d Luftwaffe,
Beyond the wire the last soil layers curl’d,
Uncorking Oberleutnant Von Werra;
Fellow escapers
He bids auf weidershein,
Then offs for fresh capers, to steal himself a plane.
Brassy bold down the police station,
“Sir, my name is Captain Van Lott,
I’ve crash-landed my Wellington,
Another plane must be got…”
To an airbase promptly driven,
Suspicions grew awfully hot,
“I’ll check your credentials with Aberdeen,
There’s a war on you know…” Werra, unseen,
Slips thro’ the toilet window slick,
Sprints to a Hurricane,
Whose mechanic flicks engine’s tick,
Its pilot mounts the plane
“Get out!” the Duty officer’s aimed pistol halts the train.
RAF Hucknall
December 20th
1940
Death of Eleanor Stemmler
Darkness more clear than noon-day holdeth her,
Silence more musical than any song :
Even her very heart has ceased to stir
D.G. Rossetti
“I’m delighted to tell you Frau Stemmler
A sanatorium has been founded
With facilities to help your daughter…”
“They will take good care of my beloved?”
“I’m sure they will,
All prospects beckon fine,
Now if you could just fill these forms in & then sign…”
Eleanor enter’d the abbey,
Breathing air quite crisp & clean,
Hippocratic morality
Sacrificed to cleanse the gene,
Guaranteeing supremacy,
Small matter of hygiene –
When feeble-minded deem’d unfit to live
By eugenists no doctor could forgive.
She went out her for a country ride
With excited patients,
Cool monoxide hard pump’d inside,
When closed the precious vents,
She died crying, “Momma!” desp’rate fingers scraping dents.
Hessen
Christmas Day
1940
Eastern Lights
One within in a crimson glow,
Silently sitting;
One without on the falling snow
Isa Craig
Yuletide comes in bells & yet no victor,
Der Fuhrer spends it with his Channel troops,
Thought sunken dark increasingly in Russia,
No more to leap thro’ Molotov’s tight hoops;
The time feels right
To cross the Rubicon,
Drafting all thro’ the night, ‘Directive Twenty-One.’
Egoist Napoleonic
Spurtles, “This Soviet threat
Let us stem all thro’ the Baltic
Both sides of marsh-wide Pripet,
Surrounding armies wolfhunt quick
Shall close all in a net;
Moscow has grown whore-rotten with intrigue,
Crumble she must before our bold Blitzkreig.”
Turning his back upon the West
He faced the dawning lights,
With Budapest & Bucharest,
His Axis satellites,
Advancing legions shall surpass Alexander’s Hoplites.
Eurasia
January
1941
Bombing Malta
in this bleak rain
even the monkeys seem to want
little straw cloaks
Basho
As when warm muskets curb’d an Age of Swords
Henceforth sealanes control’d from shifting air,
Where swooping hawks patrolling old whale-roads,
Drop lethal loads on all who’d venture there;
’Illustrious,’
The Axis lust to sink,
Now batter’d furious but one blow from the brink,
She limps into the Grand Harbour
& sleeps a sitting target,
Regia Aeronautica
For the coup de grace was set;
But breaching Malta’s theatre
By hell-let-loose them met –
Attack after ack-ack attack was made,
More brave, more foolish than the Light Brigade.
The heart of all hostilities
Bomb-pounded long & hard,
The Three Cities’ Fatalities
List round a wreck’d dock-yard –
What took the Turks three months to raze one night has equal scarr’d.
Senglea
16th Jan
1941
A Second Daring Escape
Vagrancy and imprisonment
Have deprived me
Of my best days of my youth
Ai Qing
Train scythes thro’ Canada’s Arctic semblance,
Its German inmates clamouring for ‘go,’
Persistence pays, Von Werra sees his chance,
Knocks black bars out, dives head-first into snow;
Such moments come
For those who dare be bold –
The frail breath of freedom turns misty in the cold.
Trekking thro’ freezing wilderness,
Warm’d by determination,
Light-twinklings his endeavours bless,
From the banks American,
The long Saint Lawrence thaws her dress,
Channels ‘tween ice floes run;
A rowing boat stolen, lacking an oar,
Now set out drifting for the safer shore.
Footfall… to some old folk he drew,
“Is this Amerika?”
“Why yes, but who the hell are you?”
“I am an officer
Of the German Air Force… I am… I was a prisoner!”
Ogdensburg
January 24th
1941
Desert Fox
how voracious time is, the herd of bodies
has gone for a moment, disappeared
among the rowboats and schooners
Olga Khvostova
As Rommel took first steps on Afric sand,
All about servants of the fiasco
Load ships, evacuation was at hand,
Arms strewn as if by Trasimene’s flow;
He cocks his cap
Thigh-cracks a riding whip,
“Someone get me a map, I want to take a trip.”
His plane flew lofty on the tour
Of simmering hot Syrte,
Sang some nomadic troubadour,
“What beauty & how ghastly!”
Italians straggling the shore
Yon mud-baked Benghazi,
With British flags proud flying everywhere,
“We shall build our fresh defences down there!”
Between palm-leaf lined boulevards
Parades the Werhmacht grey,
Like picture-cards, ev’ry ten yards
& what a hand to play,
When his aces, the Panzers, have arrived to join the fray.
Tripoli
February 14th
1941
(AA) Canto 26: Strugglebound
**************************************
By the will of the Mediterranean people the ‘British Episode’ in this sea is finished
Il Mediterraneo
Allies
Man now his Virtue’s diadem
Puts on & proudly wears
Great thoughts, great feelings came to them
Lord Houghton
Great Britain spends the last of her dollars,
Threadneedle’s twinkling bullion bled dry,
If ever should she be victorious
Give her the means for bartering supply;
What vision rests
In Rooseveldt’s rare brain,
“Tis in our best int’rests the battle to sustain.”
The policy that was lend-lease,
Pleasant child of the New Deal,
Reflected climes of prosp’rous peace;
Aircraft, shermans, ships & steel,
Minerals, cereals, obese,
Serve up a vital meal,
Providing Britain’s back bone with its meat
Cost waiv’d until Old England’s on her feet.
Without warfare’s foremost sinew
All bids for triumph fails,
Magnate & Jew stitch wealth into
Britain’s heroic sails…
Tis not the longest sword but deepest purse that e’er prevails.
USA
February
1941
West End North
Our mother is praying, our father is gone
To the forest, on wolves to make war.
Oh sing us a ballad, the tale then repeat
Goethe
A letter came from Burnley, Lancashire,
Jess Linscott of the Vic Dame Sibyl saw,
Some thirty years ago, would offer her
& her company a safer place, but raw
& quite uncouth
Compar’d, when, with London
But surely, sir, forsooth, the show must carry on!
The troupe of Thespians doubl’d
With the best of Sadler’s Wells,
T’where townsfolk once were troubl’d
By the Pendle Witches’ spells
Where in bedrooms seven huddl’d –
Like Cambridge matin bells
The factories woke them every sun-up
“Don’t worry, cock, this’ll keep yer chin up.”
The landlord pours a pint o’ stout
Sibyl sips delicious,
Thro’ coal & clout, there was no doubt
These lads o’ Lancashire,
“The finest in the county too!” were now all friends of her.
Burnley
February
1941
Balkan Conquest
The winter fly I spared
Was captured by
the cat
Issa
As when she join’d the Kaiser’s sorry fight
Bulgaria bedazzl’d by Berlin,
Selling her soul to please the Tripartite,
This time a greater Germany must win;
When midst the pack
Howl with the wolves ye must,
Fears of frightful attack worse than the bite none trust.
& so the Yugoslavian?
Forg’d from sterner spiritus,
Born of the loins of horseback Khan
& the daughters of Hellas,
Harden’d to war by Suleiman
& Turkish scimitars?
Have found their prince, thro’ promise threat & bribe,
Tying their limping realm to Hitler’s tribe.
The bad news filters through land,
The lust for battle calms,
Large armies standing down, disband,
Surrending their arms,
But for those buried in the woods or hidden in the farms.
Yugoslavia
March 26th
1941
Family Tradition
Chuala mi an reido ciuin
A cluich
Le guaim na h-innealan
Victoria Maciver
Bruce Slater struggled with the tractor key,
His right arm nigh useless without a hand
Whose bones lie pick’d clean at Gallipoli,
Buried in Anzac Cove’s more crimson sand;
Then came on his
Son Shane with feisty spring,
“Pop, back down in Alice, the army’s recruiting!”
Silent time overcame the scene,
Broken roughly by Bruce spit,
Altho’ the moment long foreseen
Heart-strings may still twinge a fit
& tho’ he’d barely known nineteen,
“Go son, go do your bit!”
Shane whoop’d with joy as he hugg’d his father,
That night they tuck’d in the Bush together…
The fire crackles as the stars
Sprinkle light thro the murk,
They talk of wars, Bruce shows the scars
Inflicted by the Turk…
“Son, soldiery is one days fighting for five weeks of work.”
Northern Territory
March 27th
1941
Axis Axle
Look, one war giving birth to another
one war crawling out from between the
legs of another, out of the rubble
Warsan Shire
Von Ribbentrop receiv’d Matsuoka
At Fuschal, gatehouse of the grand Alpine,
‘The war is won,’ stated over dinner,
‘Strike now & England’s empire must be thine!’
On Berghof peak
Hitler waited calmly,
‘This moment is unique in all of history!’
They found him in a warlike mood
& Spring’s rejuvenation,
‘Brother, when battle is renew’d
This won war will be well won,
When if ye act upon thy feud
With Rooseveldt’s nations
I promise thee Germany shall assist,
& smash those Allies with our Axis fist.’
A gasping captain makes him jolt,
& Matsuoka smile,
A lightning bolt, ‘The Serbs revolt,’
A demon spits its bile,’
‘Then we shall bathe their babes in blood & burning corpses pile.’
Berchtesgaden
March 29th
1941
Operation Retribution
In rejected heaps by a monotonous road
The old simple delights were left to lie
On the wasteland of life’s descent to night
Sri Aurobindo
To war eveil the devil ne’er could win,
The pensive Yugoslavic spirit push’d,
“Before we set the hounds upon Stalin,”
Hiss’d Hitler, “upstart yokels must be crush’d;”
Crucial delay?
Or insignificant?
To mid-June from mid-May his ‘Barbarossa’ went.
As war expand it’s theatre,
Ira furor brevis est,
Russia’s borders stripp’d of panzer,
Infantry peels from the West,
Goering prepares his Luftwaffe,
While restless Budapest
Hugs Hitler’s Janissarian legions
With men & arms, lording o’er the Balkans.
Belgrade receives the Stuka’s lay,
The reeling Serbs take flight,
Melting away, some other day
Continuing the fight,
Tito spitting at swastikas flitting into the night.
Yugoslavia
April 1st
1941
Confidence in Confidence
Never in this world is hate
Appeas’d by hatred
It is only appeas’d by love
Dhammapada
Sense hinting at the mentally diseas’d
Von Runstedt reach’d Der Fuhrer’s office late,
Instead of anger found his captain pleas’d,
Excited even, “Do not under-rate
Just what it means
Vast Russia to invade…”
His ‘destiny’ down leans on fingers widely splay’d.
The Russian army is a ghost,
That barely a man shall show,
At six to ten weeks at the most,
our men shall march thro’ Moscow
From Black Sea beach to Baltic Coast
Our Swastika shall glow!”
“I must protest,” said Runstedt, condescending,
“in this I can see no happy ending,
Just leagues on leagues of bloodshot tear,
Sir, no single season,
Shall disappear the Rus, their sheer
Size belies all reason…”
“Dumkopft! doubting my destiny’s tantamount to treason.”
Berlin
April 4th
1941
Conquest of Greece
Outside Eden the earth was imperfect,
the seasons changed,
the game was fleet-footed
Judith Wright
In certain spots the Earth resembles God,
When mountains range unclimbable, when birds
Take perches where the Titans rarely trod
& Hesiod left trembling over words;
A dream, indeed,
& those who dwell there would
Defy Il Duce’s greed with ev’ry drop of blood.
As Mussolini gave a sigh,
Asks Hitler & his horses
For help, sends Hellas in reply
The Wehrmacht’s vast resources,
Conquering hot Thermoplylae,
While, on Mount Olympus,
As round them herds of mountain goats canter’d,
Swastikas were on the summit planted.
The city of the violet crown
Grew grey & strangely still,
Tourists look down on the old town
From Acropolis hill;
& photograph’d the Parthenon for fraulines & the thrill.
Athens
April 27th
1941
Birth & Death of Brian Davies
Who are you and where do you come from?
You have killed my mother, father
Even my brothers and sisters
Patricia Mercy
How joyous when a newborn cries its first
Now sucking glibly on its mother’s teat,
His father’s swelling pride in bells shall burst,
Life understanding life ne’er seem’d more sweet;
Wild sirens sound,
Death soars in from abroad,
Bombs battering the ground along the old Mill Road.
What did you think of life, my child,
Before that bad bomb’s striking?
Thy little ward all whitely tiled
I hope was to thy liking,
Murmurs of conversation mild
Spear’d by tearful scriking,
With that warm milk you seem’d to quite enjoy
For those few minutes, you & Lawrence Foy.
“Ee-ya, la! They’ve bomb’d nan’s chip-shop!”
“Bloody, bastard fokkers!”
Kill-spheres still drop, caught on the hop,
Huskisson’s poor dockers –
But most of all slain babies names remain e’ermore to shock us.
Liverpool
May 4th
1941
(AA) Canto 27: Whirlpool
**************************************
The evil forces working through mediums are cunning enough not to show their true aims at once. These become clear to the observer only by successive stages, only gradually. Whoever has critically studied the ways of evil spirits will know that they first lure their mediumistic victims or gullible public along the path of self-injury or even self-destruction by winning their confidence with a series of successful predictions or favorable interventions
Paul Brunton
Rudolf Hess
you try to examine
if it is the food that is stale
or the stomach that is sick
Baleka Kgositsile
Dreams of walking England’s tapestried halls,
Two famous Nordic nations to unite,
Waking, now a burning impulse controls,
Taking a Messerschmitt in solo flight
Across the sea
To Scotland’s rugged shores,
Bales out, floats prettily oer heather-coated moors.
Hess was captured by a hayfork,
& prodded to the station,
“You must allow me, please, to talk
With the Duke of Hamilton…”
Churchill puff’d out his cigar smoke,
“This bizarre peace mission
Must never be permitted to prevail,
We’ll fob him off & let him rot in jail.”
Torrid bombshell fell on Hitler,
The mad Reich ‘Number Two’
Made prisoner, squealing anger,
“His mind must be cuckoo…
I’m surrounded by idiots!” the air turn’d black & blue.
The Berghof
May 10th
1941
Cultural Capital
But oftentimes, among my mind,
A Glee possesseth me,
That had I Ballet knowledge
Emily Dickinson
“Where ya going?” “I’m going out!” “Where too?”
“Who bloody wi’, more like!” “It’s just wi’ Ray…”
“Has he got a job yet?” “Dad!” “Look, love, you
Can do better!” “Well, we’re off ter ballet!”
“You’re what?” “Dancing
Sophisticated, like;”
“What, men in tights prancing – tell ’em ter take a hike!”
They had a couple in the Fleece,
Then walk’d to town in the rain,
The music wafted in like peace
As the lithe Margot Fontaine,
Did contort, glide, notes ride, release
Art’s darts time & again
Which sends the audience delirious,
“How could our bodies move so glorious?”
“How was it?” “Smashing!” “Really good!”
“Better than bingo, mam,
Our dad you should take,” “Would I blood-
Y hell as like, just clam
Up, eh? keep yer bloody caviar, where’s mi jam & spam.”
Burnley
May
1941
Ethiopia
Africa my Africa
Africa of proud warriors in ancestral savannahs
Africa of whom my grandmother sings
David Diop
A rugged patriot with fuzzy hair
Stood waiting for his moment to defy
Those traces of mustard gas lacing air,
& raising his rifle, let loose a cry;
Halle’s kingdom
Echoes ten thousand fold,
Hoisting hearts for freedom, to break Benito’s hold.
Colonel Wingate answers the call,
Crackling with warrior zen,
Beside the Blue Nile’s canyon roll
Marches his gallant Queensmen,
Into their steps brave tribesmen fall
From secret mountain den –
Guerrillaring, together, cleverly,
Destroying an outwitted enemy.
Across all Abyssinia
Generalissimo
Suits surrender… on white charger
Wingate, in triumph’s glow
Trots ‘tween the eucalyptus in the shade of Antoto.
Addis Ababba
May 20th
1941
Bismark
It was a macabre song
like the chipped tooth in the sink,
like the handcuffed man stumbling
Luis Enrique Belmonte
At last the target ventures out to sea,
The Sister of the Graf Spree & Tirpitz,
Queen of that unsinkable trinity,
Enough to give any sailor the shits;
Making contact,
Cutting her teeth in blood,
As furious attack’d sunk is the shell-shock’d Hood.
The loss of a capital ship
Strikes the English to the core,
Responding lets her engines rip
As a hundred men of war
Converge upon the last known blip –
& sights her to the fore;
& with the Home Fleet hurtles shells thro’ air,
The target wisely turns for St Nazaire,
But a lucky hull-breach slows her,
Bombarded from afar,
The Dorsetshire administers,
The toothy coup-de-gras,
Sad sailors leaping into waves deep swallowing a star.
Atlantic Ocean
May 28th
1941
Classical Debacle
Say Crete, & there is little more to tell
Of muddle tall as treachery, despair
And black defeat resounding like a bell
John Manifold
Crete raptures like a classical antique
For dread Persophone in springly lust,
Protected by Britisher, Anzac, Greek,
With ad hoc weapons rescued from the rust;
Their foe flies by,
Sky blossoms, gliders glide,
A withering reply, whole sqaudrons crucified.
By Kiwis Malleme airfield held
Beneath relentless Junkers
Gliding to land, shot at & shell’d,
Turning burning wreckages,
Yet cobra-strike contents expell’d –
Hardmen mountain troopers –
Manhandling blocks of heavy weaponry
Tipping the balance back to victory!
As Wermacht westward rolls thro’ Crete,
The Commonwealth withdraw,
One more retreat, one more defeat,
No way to wage a war,
As once again hungry half-men pluck’d from a foreign shore.
Sfakia
May 30th
1941
Secret Wars
Those days of stagnancy & cloudy threat
when the sky is silver yet quite lustreless,
where shall we turn in our indifference?
Attilo Bertolucci
Seduc’d by nasal incense of the East,
Events proceed to move precipitous,
Upon the secret fronts full force releas’d
To hide from view the hippopotamus;
Of German arms
Acute espionage,
Manoeuvring’s alarms embalms with camouflage;
Playing the ancyent game of kings
Seems Schellenberg’s true station,
Arresting all the Russian rings,
Ingrain’d within his nation,
To double agents, on kid’s swings,
Fed false information,
Like Operation Sealion once more,
Shall strike, this summer, at the Saxon shore.
Of course ‘twould be impossible
To stave the truth entire,
But terrible, most audible,
Was Stalin’s Slavic ire,
Whenever someone mention’d an invasion, he’d scream, “Liar!”
Moscow
June 2nd
1941
The Agony of France
Courage, my soul ! now to the silent wood
Alone we wander, there to seek our food
In the wild fruits, & woo our dreamless sleep
P.E. More
The French welcome the Nazi supermen,
Preferring peace to resistance & pain,
Tho’ alters rare, amid occupation,
Bare secretly the cross of lost Lorraine;
Shining spirit
Of old Ambriorix
Repugnant in the spit of one imperatrix.
“Nazi batardes!” Veronique curs’d,
Stubbing out her cigarette,
“They rape our country &, what’s worse,
Les cochons fou have raped Annette!
Somebody has to be the first
To challenge that mind-set,
We must form an arm’d group for resistance!”
“Domain…reviens dormir,” whisper’d Constance.
Slipping graceful to her lover,
Tongue-probing lust to share
‘Tween the covers, like a glove her
Man thrust his hands down there,
& tho’ her pantings sweet her soul was longing for Pierre.
Orleans
June 11th
1941
Fog of War
Without Fortune and prospect, I ignite the fire
Of impatience – the guards of prudence have vanished:
My caravan defenseless in the coming fire
Ali-Shir Nava’i
Stalin tosses his despatch into fire,
“Hitler prepares to invade, screams London,
They only want to plunge us in their mire!”
Molotov reads a note from Washington;
“The twenty third…”
“When will this nonsense end?
Attacking is absurd, Herr Hitler is our friend!”
Good company kept Khan Stemmler
For the conquest yet to come,
Singing songs throughout Silesia
Of Moscow & Lebensraum,
Bearing their blessed Swastika
Stich’d in each labarum,
A battle-banner beaming & unfurl’d,
Full flying to defend the Western world.
By frontier guards passes freight train,
Honouring the treaty,
Loaded with grain from the Ukraine,
Unaware completely
Watching it trundle by them was stormtrooper company!
Poland
June 21st
1941
Canticae Divided I
All that mortal man possesses
has mortality & passes;
everything goes hurrying past
Lucian
As Dante set himself inside his stuff
& made an epic poem from the blend,
As Byron forg’d digressions in a huff
Of satire, thus, at this cantica’s end,
Metaversal
I’ll slyly slip inside,
My poem’s stretch’d dispersal, tryptychs personified!
So here he is! the big, big man,
The man with big ideals,
Thumb-twiddling with his masterplan,
Set to shoot thro’ all the gears,
No Corsican, of course he can
Reduce the Rus to tears –
His army’s momentum – momentous, firm,
Bear’s paws shall be ‘neath which Moscow shall squirm.
Granted, that’s not my greatest line,
But life’s about mistakes,
Each one divines a warning sign
To help us slam the brakes,
I mean Russia? Napoleon? who’d risk such mad mistakes?
Kaunas
April 11th
2024
(AA) Gl’Immortali III
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born
WB Yeats
Apocalypse
Once, in the burning age
of flowing stone
the Devil’s old dark toffee overflow’d
Robin Munro
Four riders climb thro’ the bowels of DIS,
Hooves flashing thro’ flammable Phlegethon,
Splashing thro’ dismally Stygian piss,
To ford the dark waters of Acheron;
Yon Cerberus,
Three-headed, howling hound,
Over Lake Avernus, to stand on Midgard’s ground.
The air grew thick with snort & steam,
Oer the Red, White, Black & Pale,
The Moon took on a crimson gleam,
Bellow’d up a fearsome gale,
Around the hoof what horrors stream,
Pungent in noxious veil,
A thousand Civiallos & their sneer
Releas’d on Earth to furnish curse & fear.
So come the Devil, & the hounds
Of War, & with them, flame,
So come the sounds this world surrounds
& theirs, immortal claim,
& praise their heavens, but they’ll turn to warzones, all the same.
Midgard
Heavenly Counsel
Praise Him, all creatures here below
Praise Him, above, ye heavenly host !
Praise Father, Son, & Holy Ghost
Thomas Ken
Above the flight of Pegasean wing,
In quintessential realms of majesty,
Great God in Heaven, Jove, Over-king,
Sate stupor’d in a state of apathy;
The pinnacle
Of his life’s creation
Has steer’d itself ‘twards Hell’s chasm of damnation.
Unto beauteous paradise
Flew George, Denys & Michael,
Before the gates of Heaven rise
Twelve Saints & Peter’s angel,
Who grants passage, led thro’ the wise
By golden Gabriel
To Jove, slumbering by the holy hearth,
“My Lord,” chaunts Michael, “We return from Earth…
There are dark troubles brewing sire,
Satanus plots a war,
With daemon dire & dragonfire,
The Aesir to the fore,
Lord let us fight!” Jove ponders, “If ye must but just ye four!”
Divinnia
Divine War
Then came a flash from out the cloud,
& a stunning thunder-roll ;
& no man dared to look aloft
WE Aytoun
At first it seems a cloud of far distance,
Choking the icy wastes of Cocytus,
The standards of the King of Hell advance,
Behold! the proud legion of Satanus;
Waving rough sword
In motions of his might,
Behind, a Daemonhorde, above, a Dragonsflight.
As his son & heir-lieutenant,
Swings his hammer, broad Mjolnir,
Proud limbing Odin’s forces went;
From the stallion Sleipnir
Toward the trembling Occident
Points his great spear, Gungnir…
Sol tentatively rising from the East,
Grew too afraid to light the royal feast.
Mars lifts his blade, strike splits the ground,
Bellows a martial roar,
Lor’lein sound startling the hounds
Pacing the Paynim shore,
Whom approach him & approaching yield the first sign of war.
Europa
Death of Venus
Fate’s tree is crowned with thorns;
you can search forever but
no blossom will break its opacity
Hasan Sijzi
Skull-Loki steer’d his steed in freedom’s flight,
Tall oer Europa’s thickest forests & ranges,
& lands upon a mountain of delight,
Lone grey, priest loonranting of its dangers;
Strong steps funnel
Along a moisty cave cave,
Waiting in that tunnel, Love laugh’d & gave a wave.
As Loki lecher’d on her dress
& a face above all art,
The temptress-scented loveliness,
Legs slenderly held apart,
O! the vision of her cestus,
Temple’s resplendent heart-
What man could fight allurements of her charms?
What god could fight her pure, “Come to my arms!”
Plunged was a poison-tipp’d dagger
Thro’ Venus’ heaving breast,
By grey river a murderer
Lay fairest corpse arest
Hair willowing thro’ water, one breaks free from all the rest…
Horselburg
Trials of Strength
Tender-handed stroke a nettle,
And it stings you for your pains;
Grasp it like a man of mettle
Aaron Hill
Mars track’d deep wolf prints North & West & South,
& found Fenir a-feasting in the East,
Plunged his brave gauntlet thro the drooling mouth,
To lose a hand but tame this famous beast;
Mounting its back
They gallop to Asgard,
Leading a snarling pack of blood-hounds battle-scarr’d.
As all Valhalla dined & drank
On the fare of Saehrimnir
Tyr strutted in & broke a shank
From the loins of Andhrimnir,
“Good brethren pleased I am to thank
You all for being here,
Lord Odin I have sworn to challenge Thor
& win thy favours as goes Aesir law.”
He dons the magical gauntlet
That Mars enfused with power,
Forearms firm set, grunts, groans & sweat,
The contest lasts an hour,
A table smash! the Aesir cheer, how tall did Mars tower!
Valhalla
Battle Lines
A sacred burden is this life ye bear:
Look on it, lift it, bear it solemnly,
Stand up & walk beneath it steadfastly
FA Kemble
So, even Fate must pass upon Midgard
The Devil’s ruse had rush’d the Gods to war,
The Lion loosen’d from Britannia’s yard
By Neptune ferried to a foreign shore;
& takes his place,
By Tyr, the Cockerelle
& Toutatis – to face the fearsome hordes of Hell.
The air grows thick as evil scent
Spread noxious clouds applies
A sickly mix, the air is rent
By clusters of night-black flies,
Wyrd Dragonflights hath form’d a tent,
Smoke cloaks the darkling skies,
Some trompblast calls the legions to array,
The armies of Satanus on display.
On clinquant rays three saints descend,
George, Michael & Denys,
A holy blend to faith defend
With physicality,
Blades sharpen’d for the battle, feather’d backs against the sea.
Europa
A Savage Affray
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
Smoke, flash & shout; a massive, grassy plain,
The Cockerelle of Gaul battles Odin,
Together Tyr & Toutatis lay slain
& all the world was echoing the din;
Auld Saint Denys
Transforming to a Hart,
Chas’d by these tusk-boars three, hoove-pounding as they dart.
To the scene of desperate fight
Enveloping Saint Michael,
Some foulish serpent’s poison bite,
That beautiful bladesman fell,
To morass down in frantic flight
Saint George did dive pell-mell;
To disappear ‘neath flailing tooth & claw,
To burst back with his kinsman, soak’d in gore.
Slow-driven backwards twards the sea,
Albion’s precious moat,
Desperately, defiantly
The Lion rampant fought,
Deep gouges in its surly loins, wylde Harpies at it’s throat.
Europa
Halting Hell
Moloch, why sleepest thou? Beelzebub!
Mammon! & all ye potentates of hell,
Rouse, rouse, your energies
Thomas Northmore
Satanus tried to set the sea on fire
& boil the flesh of Neptune from his bones,
Saint George swings wide his blade, Jove’s first flyer,
Safely whipping flames off with brisk cyclones;
Yet felt a bite,
Pure ichor gushing free,
He fac’d the Dragonsflight with terrible fury.
In raging snick-a-snack attack,
Deus dripping from bright eyes,
Three dragonskulls split with a crack,
To the final foething flies,
& slices wings from bony back,
One heart’s thrust & it dies –
A day of evil darkness pacified,
What dismay’d groans erupting from Gaul’s shore-side.
Dreadful Babababashurath,
The dauphin Lizard king,
Bred wrack’d with wrath, son of ‘Gorath,
Black bone where once was wing,
Sinks deeply with dragonicide, its limp tail following.
Europa
Restless Victory
Disconsolate I go,
The summer looks as cold to me
As winter’s frost & snow
John Clare
‘Tis the end of a terrible battle,
& dully-dimm’d the light that shines for good,
Out of the fight invited Cockerelle,
Corner’d & trapp’d unhappy in a wood,
Just St Denys,
Fled free; transform’d to hart,
Speeds headlong for the sea, hooves pounding as they dart.
Deep in dark Europa’s forest
Feast of victory fair spread,
Whose silver-plated centerpiece
Was the Cock’relle’s head
Satanus raises his chalice
To toast the battle’s dead –
Lieutenants, letting loose a rancid cheer,
Echoed by the war-wonderful Aesir.
Balrog rankles in drunken fit
Abuse hurl’d at the Beast,
“This war is shit! Let’s increase it
& march off to the east –
Enough blood courses thro’ those plains for fifty Fra’aagh to feast!”
Bialowieza
(AA) Canto 28: Barbarossa
**************************************
Perhaps when distant people on other planets pick up some wavelength of ours all they hear is a continuous scream
Iris Murdoch
Diplomatic Breakdown
Begin to learn the patience needed
till the bears’ return, the day
they launch themselves, hungry
George Sipos
Gunflash invigorates the Eastern dawn
& onset marks of dark Barbarossa,
A thousand miles of battle-lines are drawn,
Scale dwarfing the grandstanding of Wagner;
Molotov hears
A hammer at his door,
What arrogance appears? The Reich Ambassador!
“…acts of Russian terrorism
We shall force to pay the cost,
Our rapport with communism
Sadly is forever lost,
Due to Jewish bolshevism
The Nieman hath been cross’d!”
A flabberghasted laugh… a look… a pause…
“& so, at war, our country is with yours.”
A flapping fish caught in a net,
Molotov moved closer,
“Our armies set to meet your threat,”
We shall see… Heil Hitler!”
A click of heels, a strutting out, chang’d Earth’s fate forever.
Kremlin
June 22nd
1941
Unstoppables
Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away
Delmore Schwartz
Professional processions from the West
Mute the birdsongs of Lithuania
Confidence beaming, their co-emptive quest
To quell the Communistic mania
That like disease
From Moscow’s canker spreads,
Pursued with perfect ease against the flapping Reds
Divisions quite disorganis’d,
Disgruntl’d & depleted,
It’s idiotic chiefs despis’d,
Equipment obsoleted,
An army madly mesmeris’d
&, it seem’d, defeated –
In roll’d the oil, “What do we do with these?
“I think, Archangel, now…” sent overseas
Those oil barrels that were meant
To fuel the London Blitz
Were promptly intercepted, sent
For Britain’s benefits,
To drop bomb loads on Berlin, sent to fill the body pits.
The White Sea
June 23rd
1941
Endless Leagues
An explosion – & a friend dies.
And so death passes you by this time.
Next it will be my turn
Semen Gudzenko
Scenery steam’d in sepianic sheen,
Battles of manic annhialation,
The greatest march the world has ever seen,
With it comes its greatest devastation;
Each Kesselschact
Tannenburg remembers,
Admonish’d pockets pack’d with desp’rate prisoners.
Some megalithic Tsunami
Breaks oer the shores of Asia,
Its spearheads roll relentlessly
Across Pomenaria
Sweeping Ukraine to the Black Sea –
Pitiful defender
Builds his bastions from friable glass,
Crush’d effortlessly as the Panzers pass.
The granges growing less & less,
All round the brown steppes band,
Vast & endless, vapid, friendless,
Idaho feindesland –
Stalin’s colossal empire in the palm of Hitler’s hand.
Byelorussia
July
1941
The Axis
Would he of icy clouds a throne carve bright,
Or would the demons of the deepest night
A bar build where the shining stars sweep free?
Adam Bernard Mickiewicz
Von Ribbentrop receiv’d Matsuoka
Schloss Fuschl, gatehouse of the grand Alpine,
“The war is won,” stated over dinner,
“Strike now & English empire’s your goldmine!”
On Berghof peak
Hitler waited calmly,
“This moment scores unique in all of history!”
They found him in a warlike mood
& Spring’s rejuvenation,
“Brother, when battle is renew’d
This won war will be well won,
When if ye act upon thy feud
With Rooseveldt’s nation,
I promise thee Germany shall assist,
& smash those Allies with our Axis fist.”
A gasping captain makes him jolt,
& Matsuoka smile,
A lightning bolt, “The Serbs revolt,”
A demon spits its bile,
“Then we shall bathe their babes in blood & burning corpses pile.”
Berchtesgaden
July
1941
Death Squad
The dim boy claps because the others clap.
The polite word, handicapped, is muttered in the stands.
Isn’t it wrong, the way the mind moves back
Richard Hugo
Buscher flavours mincemeat work with relish,
Hunts down the local Party Kommissar,
Whips him, strips him, rips him like a catfish,
Aufklawrong face of burglarizing War;
Penn’d in Juden
Made sad, Schutzstaffel slaves,
“Follow me you vermin, we go to dig your graves!”
Nazi bestiality pours
Oer conquer’d territory,
Sanguinarius Quaesitors –
Einsatzgruppen – kill for glee,
Clipboards notch numbers for the cause
Quite meticulously,
Impressing Himmler with the murder’s pace,
“I must observe a mass shooting take place.”
The bullets whizz, his shoe-shine spit
Splatters with blood & brain;
Edge of death-pit, close to vomit,
The dying squirm in pain,
“These methods are too crude… we must use something more humane.”
Byeloruss
August 15th
1941
Orphans
My question could have been, In what country
will your pillow finally come to rest
and the rain call you home
Nancy Kuhl
Mister sleep misses Kenny & Mavis,
Kept awake by the rumbling punishment
Shaking the distant cottonopolis,
A dull, red glow its torture’s testament;
While down the stairs
A letter is discuss’d
To share it with their cares, or censure it in trust?
They went out as a family
To spend the odd, spare shilling,
On ribb’d sands by the Irish Sea
Run pilots green for drilling,
Quarter’d in ev’ry B&B;
Oer the pack’d proms milling
Young Mavis pointed out approaching sight –
Two air fighters lock’d in thrilling dogfight!
For half-an-hour they fought anon,
& none were barely better
The duel done, all petrol gone,
Engines fail & splutter;
Crashing both on crushpack station, deaths entwine together.
Blackpool North
August
1941
Subjugations
My days were a thing for me to live,
For others to deplore;
I took of life all it could give
Countee Cullen
Buscher rode to the gorge at Babi-Yar,
Black conduit to extermination,
Stripping Jewesses of dress, slip & bra,
He lined them in naked degradation;
Life’s last moments
Wailing in extremis,
Machine gunner opens, delivering death’s kiss.
He rode thro’ warm, Autumnal rain
To a solemn city square,
Men strung up in a greivous pain
Did dance short-time upon the air,
Near them Dosia waits in train,
Voluptuous & fair…
Buscher trots slowly all along her line,
Dismisses the rest, “This one shall be mine…
…Send her to my house in Bremen!”
Beady eyes undress her;
Young Konstantin boil’d up within,
Sprinted home to Mother,
With tear-streak’d eyes he splurted out, “They have stolen sister!”
Kiev
September
1941
Natural Mercy
He surfaces. A screel at first light.
He is alone and at leisure. He is
talking to himself, pecking at the waterfall
Nitoo Das
As souls protected by a wall of flesh,
Defenses stiffen at the Stalin line,
Pillbox & village fortify the mesh
Threshing the sacroiliacal spine
Of Germans clang-
Ing angrily along,
‘Twhere stubborn spearsmen sang their sostenuto song.
“Another filthy prisoner!”
The untursturmfuhrer said,
“Why send him to Kozelshchyna
Wasting water, fuel & bread,
Let’s get rid of him… Dietwolf!” “Sir!”
“Go shoot him in teh head…”
“Where?” “Wherever, just do it…” slow, serene,
The Goddess KARMA, queen-like, chose the scene.
The Russian begs, weeps for his life,
Whos young scar’d eyes did stare
At photo-wife, Deit lifts his knife
& cut the wristbonds bare
“I’m a soldier, not a killer…” & shoots into the air.
Shlisselburg
Sept 7th
1941
Letters Home
Alas, my memory
Does not want to leave me
And in it, live beings
Czesław Miłosz
Nine torrid months finds Lina’s mind a-whirl,
Still grieving for the loss of her daughter,
“She always seem’d a fit & healthy girl,
How she could have died of pneumonia?”
“My darling wife,
We must give up her ghost,”
Fresh toast & butter knife… Friedrich fetch’d in the post.
“Papa, this is Khan’s handwriting!”
Max snatch’d at his son’s hand,
Tensions delay’d the opening,
Too few contents too soon scann’d,
“All is well! But he is missing,
Mama, his food so bland…
Ev’rywhere the army victorious…
He’ll be home, he is sure, before Christmas!”
“The proudest I have ever been,
My boy he is so brave!”
Xaver’s eye-sheen films with dark green,
Affections he did crave,
So rush’d to join the U-boat arm, for action & the wave.
Berlin
September
1941
(AA) Canto 29: War Wounds
**************************************
All is ruin’d, for fire & the headlong God of War
Speeding in a Syrian chariot shall bring you low.
Many a tower shall he destroy, not yours alone,
While over the roof-tops black blood runs streaming
In prophecy of woe that needs must come
Aristonice
Commander-in-Chief
Then red in the reek of that evil cloud,
The Hun swept over the plain;
And the murderer’s dirk did its monster work
WW Campbell
Striding relentlessly Der Fuhrer breaks
The shackles of his vaulting ambition,
Drunk on stunning success he calmly makes
A crucial & game-changing decision;
“First we shall throw
A cloak round Leningrad
&, ignoring Moscow, swing south to Stalingrad.”
Map after map mural’d the walls
With all of his massive gains,
Whose obsequious generals
Wet as otters in the rains,
“We must mount, soon, the broad Urals,”
Their supreme chief explains,
“& with my duty to this world complete
This world shall ever tremble at the feat.”
Stood representing each army
A six-inch swastika,
From which sat free the Czar’s city,
“For that peasant Mecca,
Let her vanish from Earth’s face, berseigtigen forever.”
Wolf’s Lair
September 9th
1941
Imperial Japan
The Master smiled:
For the Seed that He had set
Broke presently thro’ the mould
Robert Buchanan
Sit amidst the shuku-kei of Basho,
Nibbling upon delectable sushi,
Observe a most engrossing game of Go,
Cherubim up-topping cups of Saki;
Chrysanthemums
Scenting Septembral air,
Gorgeous rainbow pom-poms in riot ev’rywhere.
In their casual Wafuku
War seems very far away,
Geisha passes round rich tofu,
“What of Britain?” she did say,
“Her empire sickly thro’ & thro’,
They won’t survive the fray…”
“True Kido-San,” said Basho, “but, for me,
America our one true enemy…
Such crude embargo set in place,
Forbidden to buy oil,
We feel disgrace, that haughty race
Has set my blood aboil!
Friends! we must win an empire their machinations to foil.”
Kanazawa
September
1941
Prisoner of War
Against the armour of the storm
I’ll hold my human barrier,
maintain my fragile irony
Hamish Henderson
Cradle of Slavic Christianity
Blown up Sergei Stiltski’s own brethren,
Trudging slowly thro’ this depress’d city,
Close to the road resounds an explosion;
Marching to war
Yon Kiev’s anxious hive,
Toward the front’s dull roar, one rifle between five.
A disaster without precedent,
The largest ever troop-trap,
As Hitler wounds an elephant
With a circle on a map,
With Stalin sat impenitent
As broke the thunderclap;
Six hundred thousand survive the battle,
Fenced off in roofless fields like dumb cattle.
“Food!” “Food!” Sergei springs to action
& sprints to this barb’d wire,
Heaving legion of starving men,
Moaning hunger’s desire,
Scrapping for scraps… he caught a bap, tho stale wolf-gorged entire.
Ukraine
September
1941
Drang Noch Osten
The east wind blows rain,
Vexing the rambler.
The road turns to mud
Lu You
Stalin’s laughter haunts Hitler’s garish dreams,
Ghosts whisper, “Delenda est Carthago!”
Come morning konferenz his sol-fa screams,
“I must begin the drive upon Moscow!”
“Perhaps we should
First form a winter’s line?”
“Nonsense! with one last shove the Kremlin shall be mine.”
Those mucky & encouching seas,
Thick, brown, froze ev’ry axle,
The Wehrmacht sinks up to it’s knees,
Jackboots suck’d from each ankle,
Their throttle roar more flagging breeze,
A foundering battle…
While Ollie rifles thro’ the Russian dead
Some sleep-coat stands & stabs him in his head.
Khan blew that black-tooth’d grin away
& dug his friend’s death-hole,
The grave fill’d in, loss felt like kin,
For friendship touches soul,
While from the ruthless Heavens Winter’s first snowflake did fall.
Dorogobuzh
October 7th
1941
Emperor
Dawn —
fish the cormorants haven’t caught
swimming in the shallows
Yosa Buson
Lilts Tojo, admiring, thro’ lush gardens,
Yon lotus buds with flowers commingling,
Thro’ palace halls tapestried with legends,
To the throne of a line everlasting:
Bows low he there;
Below his Emperor,
Sate on his dragons-chair, flank’d by vase & flower.
His excellency, Hideki,
Has gain’d Hirohito’s trust,
“How long must we let them treat thee
Like some coolie in the dust?
We must attack our enemy,
To strike first is a must,
To destroy our great Pacific rival,
Yamamoto wills your heart to battle!”
The starsoul thinks, then with a sigh,
Lets War loose with a nod,
A time to fly, a time to die,
In service to their ‘god,‘
Strains Japan’s soul, all set to burst from Wisteric seedpod.
Tokyo
Nov 3rd
1941
Fortress Malta
This is the dark time, my love,
All round the land brown beetles crawl about
The shining sun is hidden in the sky
Martin Carter
Mussolini blames his woes on Malta,
“Allow this hornet’s nest no hour of rest,
An unsinkable aircraft carrier,
From now keep her activity depress’d;
She is the knife
Press’d on lines of supply,
Her people full of life, then they will have to die.”
The Maltese met Il Duce’s rage,
Determin’d on liberty,
Imprison’d in an island-cage
They’ll dig themselves to safety,
A second neolithic age,
For faith’s first family;
Living life in a limestone catacomb,
Candles & prayers lighting up the gloom.
Fighting for their little country
They’d help a global cause,
‘Tween Italy & Tripoli
Attack’d the Axis stores,
With submarines & wellingtons, force all the wrack of wars.
Mediterranean
November
1941
Day in the Life
The brittle aromatic sage, which,
Trodden down, gives forth a fragrance that hangs
Upon the air, as broken bodies bleed
M Wilmoth
Dust devils swept the deadlock of Tobruk,
Dead heart of this most dreadful of dead lands,
The molten, hostile sky of the Menluk,
Medusa’s blood-serpents squirming thro’ sands;
As Dawn slow grows
Eager for the slaughter
Tommy Sumner arose… life short, but days shorter.
From out some mess tin Tom did shave,
Nobble-knee’d in khaki pants,
White knight of a Crusader wave,
Carthaginian elephants,
Whose citadels turn totall’d grave,
Flames licking from the vents…
& with a best mate shot on either side
A brown-eyed boy from Burnley nearly died.
As Billy writhed in agony,
On hot sand worm-guts spill’d,
How terribl’y veterancy
Such hellish sights did build,
‘If mi number int on it,’ Tommy thought, ‘I sha’nt get kill’d!’
Cyrenaica
November
1941
Slavic Sore
To learn from trees, from skyward-aiming poplars,
how humble, and yet upright, to remain.
To understand that what they keep imploring
Magda Isanos
On continental Europe all is plain,
All, all fallen in Hitler’s eager hands,
But for the neutrals – Sweden, Suisse & Spain –
& one bold bunch of rugged mountain bands;
When he can say
Veni, Vidi, Vici,
Must surely come today, into that wild contree
His legionnaires onslaughting crash’d,
But again Tito stands firm
Neath Stuka, Krupp & motar blast,
Of a wrathful donnersturm,
As shades of night were falling fast,
A partisanic squirm
Out of his grasp, up to the mountainsides
Into safe regions, led by local guides.
These fearless, spirited, unique,
Indomitable men
Play hide & seek, while week by week
The Wehrmacht try again –
Sensing their liberation, now, is not an ‘if?’ but ‘when!’
Montenegro
November
1941
Glimpse of Glory
they are making you fight a treacherous war,
you were not born in snow
you do not know snow, come back
Akhil Katyal
Fascisti race to the gates of Moscow,
Ran ragged in her ruin’d environs,
Ice-caked at thirty-five below zero,
& the Russkis still scrapping like demons;
Skirting the verge
Of that fabled city,
One last glorious surge must seize them victory!
Kampfswagon engine warm’d by fires,
Khan’s company advances,
On reconnaissance’s acquires
Most mythical of glances,
In nearing distance Moscow’s spires
Flutter like goldfinches,
Rough volley of gunshot disturbs the dream
For motley crews of workers on them stream!
With the Panzers frozen solid
A few leagues to the rear,
Entrench’d Russian, with wrench & gun,
In action ever near,
With pisgah sight those spires espied… mist shrouds… then disappear.
Khimki
December 3rd
1941
(AA) Canto 30: Explosion
**************************************
The barbarians are to arrive today
C.P Cavafy
American Opinion
It is imminent; in the sudden smell
of wet grass and stir among the frangipani,
in the straight tense fence-posts in half-light
Wong Phui Nam
Rita clocks off another working day
Making deadly accoutrements of War,
Collected her ever-increasing pay,
Then nipp’d in for a whiskey down Hank’s Bar;
Conversation
Deepens at the refill,
“I did not raise my son just to die for Churchill!”
“I fought,” said Hank, “In Flanders’ mire,
Back in Nineteen Seventeen,
Pull’d Britain’s chestnuts from the fire
In scenes like ya’ve never seen,
Just so that lousy old Empire
Remains our global queen!”
A tear slipp’d from the corner of his eye,
“Y’know I saw a lotta good men die.”
She drains the glass, gush’d from her core,
“God bless America!”
Walks thro’ the door to Ned’s new store,
There buys a newspaper,
Front pages dominated by sour-face Mister Hitler!
Jerkwater
December 5th
1941
Pendulum Turns
My country is my pride & glory!
The great Soviet people in a headlong rush
Of fiery lava will wipe out the fascist gang
Nikolai Tikhonov
For those friends having fail’d to run the course
Willie’s harp sang a sad & lilting dirge,
Breakfasting on the flesh of frozen horse,
Sweat froze to Khan at his madnesses verge;
Reduced to rags,
Barely untermenschen,
O torn & tatter’d flags, O worn & shatter’d men!
Over Moscow’s frozen river
Came Zhukov’s counter-attack,
Fresh soldiers of Siberia,
From many a hunter’s shack,
Spirits fortified by vodka,
Snowsuits upon the back,
Supported closely by planes & cannons,
Shall pulverise those exhausted Germans.
Thus perishes the same retreat
Which slew the Grand Army,
Raped with defeat, scraping ice-sheet
Men trudge dejectedly,
Homes burning, & potatoes, to express tough enmity.
Russia
December 6th
1941
Pearl Harbour
Sometimes I fly at dawn above the sea,
Where, underneath, the restless waters flow—
Silver, and cold, and slow
Paul Bewsher
Sol’s portal rose Impayen from silk sea,
Illumes a rain-thrash’d fleet thro’ morning mist,
Upon the flat-top of the Akagi
Yamamoto crushes pearl in fist;
World-airwaves fill,
“Tora-Tora-Tora!”
Instreaming for the kill, screaming, “The Emperor!”
They burst on battleships in rows
Like Samurai hard charging,
Swin-streaking swordfin torpedoes,
Underneath the whizzing wing
An awful & unlawful show,
Noble ships exploding,
Day of Lusitanian proportions,
Flys everywhence across the world’s oceans.
“KERWHOOM!” The West Virginia
Joins the sunken others,
Oklahama, Arizona –
But not the carriers –
Thro’ chance or fate, steaming at sea, peacef’ly on manoeuvres!
Hawaii
December 6th 1941
08.15
First Strike
You have blown out beauty
with a breath, torn her,
dealt her the death-wound
Salvatore Quasimodo
Barb’d hornets flew all over Ohau,
In lethal waves obsessing for the kill,
Too slowly the realisation grew,
“We are being attack’d! This is no drill!”
Amidst the hell
That burnt at Hitcham Field
A Yankee gave a yell behind a Browning shield.
This all-American hero,
While pals hugg’d nearby ditches,
Spread lead, fed with deadly gung-ho,
“Ya yella sons of bitches!”
A cracking shot plunged some Zero
Into football pitches,
Crash-landing & smashing into a post,
“Goddam! That slant-eyed mother fucker’s toast!”
With the morning’s carnage over,
With no more death to spread,
Each warrior – in good order –
Atop the white wave sped,
Leaving Hawaii belching smoke & Hirohitan dead.
The Pacific Ocean
December 7th 1941
09.30
America Goes to War
A million, ten million, singing, “I am ready.”
This the sun looks on between two seaboards,
In the land of Lincoln, in the land of Grant & Lee
Carl Sandburg
Thin veil of snow covers the capital,
A little ice drifts on the Potomac,
An all together pageant of wonderful,
Oblivious to enemy attack;
Dines Rooseveldt
Inside those Whitehouse walls,
The perfidy hard felt, the murdering apalls.
News-tickers read the deed aloud,
What words to be receiving,
Rude shock electrifies the crowd
Jaws dropping disbelieving,
A father’s tear slips sad & proud,
Portending his grieving…
Deep in the Dustbowl Carlton park’d his car
To race into the kitchen babbling ‘Ma!
Ma! Where are you?”‘ About the farm
The workers gets the gist,
“Don’t join the army, boy, stay calm,”
“But Ma, I must enlist!”
She tried to soothe him with soft hands, but strokes a pearl-clench fist.
Jerkwater
December 7th
1941
Rewards of Patience
We that so glory in your high decision,
So trust your goal;
All Europe in our blood, but yours our vision
ES Swift
Face sighing stern, lips draining brandy glass,
Marlborough’s blood congealing for the fight,
Depress’d with this unpleasant presentness,
No way to win the Wars at all in sight;
Blimp from dinner,
Cheeks half-cock’d all aglow,
He gestures his butler fetch in the radio…
As he twiddl’d with his diamonds
Tun’d to service with a clink
“… attack’d the Hawaiian islands…”
Splash, spit, splurt, out burst his drink,,
“All the tides & all the oceans,
Dare this be what I think?”
By private line he reach’d the President –
To serve his hopes, it seem’d, an angel sent.
“God be with you!” how civilly
Men end a friendly call
His boyish glee vees victory,
“So we’ve won after all…
Now Hitler’s fate is seal’d,” he utters with a sterner drawl.
London
December 7th
1941
Sunrise
The sun that in the East does rise
Drapes clouds with golden gown,
O’er seas and peaks it sails the skies
Bernhard Severin Ingemann
Harvesters of Hirohito’s blessing
Invasion-fleeted, surg’d across the sea
Nippon’s naval majesty expressing,
To manifest, at last, their destiny!
Sacred crusade
On wings of iron & fire,
The White man will be made to choke on his empire.
From Cathay down to Mandalay,
Oer Kota, Thailand & Guam
The Sunrise burst with roaring ray
Across colonial calm
Cheap stars of tin hacking their way
With masterful sword-arm,
The whole of West Pacifica ablaze
Night, pitch-black, lay upon the deep,
Splinter’d by moon’s bright glow,
Towards shores steep sea-soldiers creep
Steep’d in deep bushido
The only sounds were motor whirrs until the sandy blow…
Malaya
December 8th
1941
Axis Expansion
O how impossible it is for the ill-fated
Poet to know his destiny. How can he say
By whom he will be slandered, hated
Yuli Daniel
A date to prosper long in infamy
& many a death sentence rubber stamp
With Hitler’s face, the world’s arch enemy
Whose mistress switches on the bedside lamp;
Marettimo
To Turin & Trieste,
Armour’d armadillo snarls at the Eagle West.
Il Duce war declares, city
Eternal senses unease,
With depthless minerality
America, overseas,
Is royal with reality
Brains cool’d by logic’s breeze,
Ciano gaz’d down the Via del Corso,
“Yankee tanks will clank up here – I know so,
When bucket tears shall clear the blood
Fill’d by the widow springs…”
But then who could stop that fresh flood
Of fashion, Fascist kings
Determine mass reactions of the mussolinilings.
Rome
December 11th
1941
Releasing Wolves
What will we do
when there is nobody left
to kill?
June Jordan
As packs of seawolves rise from rock & reef
Like children unbridl’d to a garden
The U-Boats in conjubilant relief
Unleash’d to focus an ocean’s cordon;
To win this war
Old Britain must be starv’d
Thro’ merchant shipping tore a darkness sharply carv’d.
As Schellenberg rakes thro’ the files
From comprehensive sources
An accurate report compiles
For Heydrich on the forces
Of American Anglophiles –
Metals, oil & horses;
“Eighty-five to ninety million tonnes
Of steel?” “Yes sir!” such massive numbers stuns
Hitler… “Unsinn!” Goering retorts,
“What absolute nonsense
He crafts reports to convince courts
Of his self-importance,
Better let psychiatrists tend this mental disturbance.
Berlin
December 13th
1941
(AA) Canto 31: Dangerpitch
**************************************
‘A soldier’s life is terrible hard,’ says Alice
A.A.Milne
World War
Hurry, oh fast-flying Time, fly more quickly!
In my new armour I faint, I am choking.
I shall alight, with Death holding my stirrup
Mikhail Lermontov
Rommel is retreating to Gazala,
Barbarossa nears annihilation,
Closing net sets Hitler to the ponder,
Torn open by timely escalation;
With vital blow
An ally ne’er vanquish’d
Has ridden to the show in ways he would have wish’d.
Summoning the Reichstag android
Rose Hitler, virulently,
“We cannot this world war avoid –
The responsibility
Of that half-Judaiz’d, negroid,
Capitalist country!
Standing side-by-side with the Emperor,
I have declared against America!”
Whi
As the claque joy demonstrated
A twinge shook Goering’s gut,
His long waited, ever-fated,
Mad nightmare nailing shut,
A Reichmarshall woe-whispering, “Now Deautschland is kaput!”
Berlin
December 11th
1941
Resettlement
Stooping in solemn grief, down the muddy trek
Moves the sad cortege. The scrawny little nag
Slowly draws the hearse, stretching its long neck
Vojislav Ilić
The Star of Poland, stitch’d in yellow band,
Marks the arm of every human Jew,
That on the pack’d platform with Grunfelds stand –
A cattle wagons clatters into view;
Peasant & Priest
Into that cramm’d space sent,
Trains lurching to the East, towards resettlement.
As frightful freights of pity flow,
Desperation stagnates air,
One welcome smile softens the blow,
Waited Jakob calmly there,
To lead them thro’ a grey ghetto,
A flat for all to share –
Two rooms & one tiny lavatory
Was all there was to host his family.
Nikki slipp’d to the ghetto wall,
The sign ‘Verboten’ said,
Chasing the roll of her wee ball,
The sentry shot her dead…
Wailing kinah to side & sheloshim the Grunfelds sped.
Warsaw
December
1941
Death of Khan Stemmler
He said to us, his eyes like candles,
“Men! Isn’t Moscow there behind us?
Let’s die for Moscow now
Mikhail Lermontov
All across the front the counter-strikes start,
Spurr’d on by vengeance, Stalin & Smirnoff,
It seems as if the ghosts of Bonaparte
Have fled the cannonades of Kutuzov;
Adolf aghast,
Thin hair afleck with grey,
“The army will stand fast, we must not fight like Ney!”
Footed firm with heavy losses
Germans slow the grand Russian,
But now invincible hubris
Defeated to depression,
Like Sargon’s curs’d calamiities
With the Kullumaean…
Without his fingers, toes & half-a-nose
Khan staggers lifelorn thro the drifting snows.
CRACK! CRACK! He falls awrith with pain,
Snow red-stain’d where he bled,
The warm breaths wane, the bloody mane
Of some befang’d wolfshead
Brushes his cheek, rips out his throat… today the pack well fed.
Russia
Christmas Day
1941
Malta Silenc’d
So they buried her, & turned home,
a drab psalm
hanging about them like haar
Kathleen Jamie
Christmas passes &, without a victor,
Hitler curses Calypso’s hardy isle,
From whose short airstrips, serving Valetta,
Afric’s convoys attack’d mile-after-mile;
As Rommel starv’d,
Suez vein flows open,
Sundering forces, halv’d twyx Saxons & Russian.
Malta’s besieg’d by brutal means,
As Mussolini’s navy
Convok’d bloodthirsty Hagarenes
Who’d throttl’d her from the sea,
Old churches blown to smithereens
By codotteiri
Leading Luftwaffe; air-stips pulveris’d,
At last this pestilence is neutralized!
Merchantmen to Sicilia’s
Fair shores of saffron flow,
Thro’ siestas topless sailors
On decks spread tranquilo;
Below, tanks gloop with petrol to ride the Libyan plateaux.
The Mediterranean Sea
January 4th
1942
The Final Question
You’re our country’s lost property
with no office to claim you back.
You’re polluting our sounds. You’re so rude.
Jussawalla
Heydrich receives Hitler’s whim thro’ Himmler,
Schutzstaffel konferenz to Wansee borne,
Yachts dallying on a gentle water
Sumptuous luncheons laid on level lawn;
Gfromfinger-licks
& champagne guzzl’d hard,
Men dawdl’d thro’ dorics of a v
“The time hath come for Endlosung,”
Chirp’d Heydrich over brandy,
“The very last blood-drop be wrung
From the Jews methodic’ly,
& spare us not avenging young,
Raise hands if you agree…”
This act of villain faith wraithweevils share,
Adds Eichmann, “Let us breath, a cleaner air…
At Auswich an innovation
Successfully was tried,
The gas Zyklon… deportation
Shall drain Europa wide,
In fifty months more than ten million Jews will have died…”
Berlin
January
1942
Soviet Stoicism
at regular intervals,
one dry leaf after another
falls from the tree
Vinod Kumar Shukla
Snow falls with a blizzard-bitter harshness,
Yet onwards, ever onwards, rolls the war,
God mighty canon-Krupps sent to oppress,
The celebrated ‘Venice’ of the Czar;
Constant shellfire
Rains down on every side;
No redoubt to retire, no bunker for to hide.
Despite worsening misery
Of the hungry, cold half-dead,
Men kept alive through poetry
& the sawdust in their bread,
But none hold onto sanity
With bellies barely fed,
Beloved pets spit roasted, streets of fear
As first few little children disappear.
Krasnaya fills with men & guns,
Oktober’s famed parade,
The sights of sons & fathers stuns,
The women in the shade,
Saluting Vladamir’s statue off to the front they fade.
Leningrad
January
1942
British Ocean
I will go & lie inside his body,
Go down in the sea where they buried him,
& stay with him there
Ifaluk Atoll
The waters of the world a wild whirlpool,
Ships sucking into sub-infested seas,
Here wolfish packs of hunter-slayers rule
Across convulsing convoys, like disease!
Atop the main,
Tho,’ Germans second best,
Like fleets of France & Spain, & bottled up in Brest!
Three German warships & their men
Desperate for home waters;
Scharnhurst, Gneisnau, Prince Eugen,
Adash the Channel waters,
Courting no man with Nelson’s ken
Commands Britain’s forces,
With English radarstreams cleverly jamm’d
They’ll run the flimsy gauntlet to Deutcshland.
Amid Hanseatic safety
& the Norwegian fjords,
Hitler’s navy rejects the sea
& slowly rots the boards,
Imprinted on their psyches is the sharp of Deptford’s swords.
Coast of Europa
Feb 15th
1942
Fall of Singapore
Blowing from the west,
Fallen leves gather
In the east
Buson
The Tyger of Malaya gains his name,
The teeming jungles stain by bosky blood,
On England’s empire comes an eastern claim,
Built as it is on soft, tropical mud;
An army runs
Pell-mell to Singapore,
Where vital forts & guns stuck on the southern shore.
Shane Slater fed into the fight,
A total, bloody shambles!
Watches Shonan, the Southern light,
Fair cauldron of world peoples,
Bow meekly to the Tyger’s might,
Tyrant without scruples,
Dehumanizing all who surrender
“Cowards call yourselves, kill yourselves better!”
Miserable, defeated men
Choke the road to Changi,
Shot & beaten, none have eaten,
Luckless & footweary,
Facing uncertain futures in useless captivity.
Singapore
February 16th
1942
Manzanar
What longs to leap is impassioned
As the sound of strings he tuned and strummed,
Pulled, plucked and put aside for years
Anand Thakore
The Feds are swooping down on the Issei,
Arresting them for racial ancestry,
But left alone both Gerry & Iti,
Yes! even tho’ those lands the enemy;
From recent years
To Fourth Generation,
Pleas fall on empty ears… “But we’re American!”
As smirching citizens intern’d
In barracks’ concentration,
Precious land liberties were spurn’d
Despite the proclamation
Sign’d by the free, a freedom earn’d,
When, in celebration,
Each Fourth July confetti showers fall –
A child looks up at the camptowers tall
& with a frown did ruminate
On gunmen in the sky,
So to the gate where green men wait
She skipp’d & ask’d them,
“Why Am I in here?” they could not say nor could they simplify.
California
February
1942
Mumble Words 