(AA) Canto 32: The Siege of Malta
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Malta of gold, malta of silver, malta of precious metal,
We shall never take you!
& from her ramparts a voice replied,
I am she who has decimated the galleys of the Turks
& all the warriors of Constantinople & Galata
Badajoz
Digression
Such dire encroachments to prevent in time,
Demands the critic’s voice – the poet’s rhyme.
Can our light scenes add strength to holy laws?
RB Sheridan
I pledge a motion for the grand digress,
Which poems of this nature may include,
Some may question its appropriateness,
Yet others think the moment rather shrewd;
To all accounts
I offer further gloss,
Bless’d by those faithful founts, the Crescent & the Cross.
As we walk among these pages,
With a mind to phantsize,
Ghosts have willow’d down the ages
Forming phantoms in the skies,
As the cataclysm rages
Twix Axis & Allies,
We find the legacies of former times
Have influenced the varnish of these rhymes.
The Knights of Saint John, & their swords,
Seek out new naval base
Departing Rhodes, darting Whale-roads,
Like pirates at a pace,
To settle on a treeless rock & fortify its face.
Malta
1530
War’s Promise
I feel that I am the king of time
I possess the earth and everything on it
and ride into the sun upon my horse
Nizar Qabbani
The Peacock of the World rose from his throne,
Wishing a land-lock’d sea a Turkish pond,
“The fish of Malta is the stepping stone
To Sicily & all the world beyond;
That obscure rock
Insults us & our queen,
Thus from their viper-dock we’ll drive the Nazarene.
My finest force I shall employ,”
Added Allah’s deputy,
“These sons of dogs ever destroy,
Tho’ they earn’d my clemency
When I was young & full of joy
Thro’ my first victory,
& I allow’d them honour after Rhodes –
No more shall we suffer their vile marauds.
Our scimitars their throats shall slit,
Dragut, prepare the fleet!“
Yearning credit, gurning merit,
Gen’rals kiss jewel’d feet,
Then divan leave, planning the heathen’s ultimate defeat.
Istanbul
1564
Call to Arms
My grandmother is calling her goslings
My mother is summoning her hens
The sun has vanished into the ocean
Marilyn Chin
Grave news flies to Grandmaster De Valette,
Tho’ days of armageddon clamour near,
From coming frays his faith shall never fret,
To him the infidel inspires no fear;
“Prepare the walls,
Cancel every corso!”
The clang of cannonballs rang thro’ Saint Angelo.
Across the world the summons sent
By ship & sweat-stain’d horsemen,
“Brave knights fly back to the Convent
Go fight beside your brethren!”
Soon many-a-foreign accent
With one voice sang, “Amen,“
Renewing vows at the Sacred Altar;
Each man determined to die on Malta.
Outside, in strangest summer rain,
Four thousand strong Maltese
Shall march & train with men from Spain,
As on the ocean breeze
Soft scented Turkish incense wafted slowly overseas.
Birgu
May
1565
Muslim Landing
From the depths of the ocean
a crocodile in search of a destiny
spied the pool of light, and there he surfaced
Xanana Gusmão
From watchtowers the warning cannon ring,
The Sultan’s fleet arrives as a vast fan,
With livestock & the still-green crops of spring
Many to Birgu & Mdina ran;
Dead beast & dung
Poison’d the Marsa wells,
Songs of devotion sung as witches flung their spells.
That armada sail’d round Gozo,
To show that the sea was closed,
Then at the Marsascirroco
Made anchorage unnoppos’d,
As skiffs ferried his war-cargo
Their old commander dozed,
Untroubl’d by the course of coming days,
Sure on him, soon, the Sultan should heap praise.
Dreams were woken by Mustapha,
First sword of the army,
“My young Pasha, what’s the matter?”
Yawn’d adm’ral Piali,
“This is no time for sleeping, we must seek the victory.”
Marsaxlokk
19th May
1565
The Fall of Fort Saint Elmo
‘Tis a true & faithful saying –
‘Greater love how can there be
Than to yield up life for thee’
Bishop Doane
Dawn lifted rosy wave-breaks to the shore
Where swept a moment of sickly slaughter
For stubborn struggles, say the laws of war,
May never be allow’d normal quarter;
The Knights prepare
To make their final stand,
One crippl’d in his chair, sword tightly in his hand.
Breachward the Janissaries pour’d,
Pride of the Sultan’s power,
All inside gutted on the sword
Yet not one Knight would cower,
For, still, the Maltese Lion roar’d
For one murderous hour –
Until its throat was cut, then stone-dead fell…
Mustapha stepp’d into that groaning hell,
“So small a son has cost us dear,
Then, what price the father?”
More shots men hear, them very near
Five knights fled thro water,
Guided by Toni Bajada safely, cross the Harbour.
Birgu
June 22nd
1565
Pivotal Point
Like cormorants that seek a submerged prey.
An angel of destruction guards the door
And keeps the peace of our ancestral home
Henry Head
By boat & tower came the great assault,
The Port of Castille reeling neath the blow
All seeming lost, but for that thunderbolt
The gods upon our mortal minds bestow;
Hospital horse
Roll’d down Mdina’s ramp,
Set on a killer course to burn the Muslim camp.
As every able-bodied Turk
Rush’d toward the walls in waves,
The christians perform’d such work
On their wounded & their slaves
That thro the smoke of battle’s murk
A road of error paves –
When verged on perfect triumph Pasha hears
“Relief is sent,” fulfilling all his fears.
He march’d his army back to base,
Of enemy no sign,
His fuming face wick with disgrace,
Neck-heckles, shiver-spine,
“Where are these men from Sicily, the victory was mine!”
Marsa
August 7th
1565
The Last Assault
In an embrace which was warm and fiery.
I sinned surrounded by arms
that were hot and avenging and iron
Forough Farrokhzad
As mines explode in animosity
Toni Bajoda shot up in his bed,
Tho’ wounded he’d discover’d energy,
Men, from the sacred infirmary, led;
All gallant friends,
Tho’ most could barely stand,
Upon this strength depends the freedom of a land.
As knight shields fill’d walls warp’d by mine,
Courageous Callachio
Join’d by the Maltese at the line,
Equal with corragio,
Toni took toll of twenty-nine,
His knife well-loved the foe,
So much an arquebusier took aim,
& sent shot flying in a flash of flame.
Tho’ wounded, in a world of pain,
Toni did not falter,
Brave Muslim bane heaping his slain,
Sacrificial altar,
Fed by force indivisible, “I shall fight for Malta!”
Senglea
August 18th
1565
Gran Sossorso
When liberty is headlong girl
And runs her roads and wends her ways
Liberty will shriek and whirl
Archibald MacLeish
One hundred days of daily hearing, “When?”
Sicily’s Viceroy sends vital relief,
Below Mellieha disembarks his men,
Mustapha strokes his beard in disbelief;
“How many ride?”
“Nigh twenty thousand sire,
Combing the countryside!” “The army may retire.”
All thro’ the night the camp was struck –
As the Maltese heard them yell
Them for more attackers were mistook,
Standing arms, set to repel,
Then saw to sea the foe had snook,
& rang triumphant bell,
Amplified across the purple clover,
“The infidel has fled, the siege over!”
Come dawntint were bells still ringing,
Folk stepp’d outside the wall,
Some dance, some sing, some tear-shedding
On bleeding knees did fall,
As all about black bodies burst, curs’d by the murd’rous maul.
Birgu
September
1565
The Relief of Malta
And so when I saw you, nightmare island,
Fade into the autumnal night
I felt the tears rise up for my land
George Barker
Mustapha heard the news he had been fool’d,
Just six thousand form’d Sicily’s relief,
Piali’s caution was soon over-ruled,
“Land ten thousand & meet us up the coast!”
How felt the Turk
When forced back onto land
For more of war’d black work, with peace so close at hand?
Dispirited once brave men are,
Heads filling with dying fear,
Hard galloping down from Naxxar
Swerve the fresh-faced Chevalier,
Men from Mdina & Mgarr
Now on his flank appear,
Enough to finalise his rising doubt,
Cohesion turns to rabble turns to rout.
Some with his friends, some limping lone,
Crawl to the coastal crack,
Shelves of sandstone bare blood & bone,
Christ-sword plunged in their back,
Turks plunging towards safety by the shrill, “…& dont come back!”
Saint Paul’s Bay
September 8th
1565
(AA) Canto 33: Mortal Struggles
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To delight in conquest is to delight in slaughter
Lao-Tse
Close Run Thing
In this leafy orchard is a nightingale,
a nightingale whose songs are the dawn
and take me into the light
Farzaneh Khojandi
Stalag Luft bustles cudgel-goons & drones,
‘How terribly boring,’ thought restless Bligh,
Now sauntering to Flight-Lieutenant Jones,
Who spies a twinklefox in Nigel’s eye,
“Tonight’s the night!
Are the cutters ready…”
Life’s value actions bright for life & liberty.
Stars fire & thro’ the wire they went
With never a half-look back,
Shunning Sol’s harvest fluorescent,
March’d thro’ night’s covering black,
The dark Black Forest three weeks spent,
They climb’d into a stack…
Dawn swallowing the last of her moonbeams,
The Ranz des Vaches resounding round their dreams.
To gunshot & Teutonic shout
They woke up with a fright,
Rough bundl’d out, fell’d with a clout,
They stood up to such sight…
Almost touching the Heaven slopes of some Helvetian height.
Hoch Finstermunz
March
1942
Axis Encounters
The world is changed with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
GM Hopkins
The Axis met, the Palace of Klessheim
Saw less a meeting, more a monologue –
Mussolini kept noticing the time,
By Ciano sitting like a nodding dog;
A dirge of hours,
Permitted, none, to smoke,
While Hitler on them showers an avalanche of talk.
“Comrades of the fascist Jihad
Let us combine our forces,
Strike from the southern launching pad,
Conquering the Caucasus,
A prompt capture of Stalingrad
Cuts off Red resources,
& following, roll up the Volga’s banks
To penetrate Moscow upon all flanks!”
Whom in that room could e’er resist
Daemonic charisma,
The mesmerist slams down his fist,
“Yes, let’s march together,
To meet Japan in India, then raze America!”
April 30
1942
Duty’s Call
I am maddened with words
and no-one has managed to tell me
why the men are killing each other
Lucia Sanchez Saornil
As colossal, topographical quilt
Forg’d from old photos of the coast of France
While Aimee Gardner watch’d her flowers wilt
She wonder’d if her snaps would stand a chance
To join the spread
& somehow help the war,
A flash of postal red, a letter thro’ the door…
…Her steam train scythes inside Euston
She foliates excited,
Her taxi drills her thro’ London,
Such handsome fancies sighted,
Met, then, Captain Selwyn Jones,
Who cigarette lighted,
Said, £what do you think of Germans?” “Hatred
Yes, violent hatred unabated.”
“Where are you from?” “Miralabeaux.
I’m French essentially,
My husband, tho’, was born in Bow,
He’s true blue bells Cockney;”
“Missions there are, but you must abandon your family…”
London
June
1942
Edda’s War
To be yourself not who you were taught
Not the shell in which you are caught
Not the trivia in which you are embroiled
Sudi Nshimiyimana
Principesse opulence entices
Those rich gerachi & their arch affairs,
Plagued by the instruments of their vices
“So boring now,” sigh’d Edda, to the air
Her Condor rose,
The Eastern Front awaits,
To tend the wounded rows & mend men’s broken fates.
The sun’s exsiccativity
Has drain’d the plains of verdure,
Where powerful velocity
& hours of droning tergure,
Observes no change but the gritty
Black stripes, brutal merger
Of arms, the like of which the world ne’er had
Those charr’d ski scars speeding to Stalingrad.
At last she fac’d the Red Cross tent
Among ochelic ranks,
“May I present Edda – Muss…” “Splint!
Now! Tell Il Duce thanks,
Now put this cunting apron on & scrub those fucking planks!”
Kotelnikov
August 3rd
1941
Swinging Pendulums
for everything in the room was blood-red.
On the window sill, the flowers almost dead.
And all our daily things smelt of the abyss
Leonid Martynov
The winter offensive melts with the snow,
Two great enemies lay down exhausted,
The roads dissolving to a muddy flow,
The front is fix’d, time swung to count the dead;
The German’s score
One million underground,
The Russians many more, what first titanic round!
“Comrades of the fascist Jihad
Let us combine our forces,
Strike from the southern launching pad,
Conquering the Caucasus,
A prompt capture of Stalingrad
Cuts off Red resources,
& following, roll up the Volga’s banks
To penetrate Moscow upon all flanks!”
The pendulum swings back due East,
Stalin’s armies pounded,
More men releas’d, the net increas’d,
All reserves surrounded…
To hoard such feasts of prisoners twelve fresh death camps founded.
Kharkov
May 12th
1942
Burma
Where he makes the rifles cough,
Stutter. Where the reveille
Is staccato majesty
Gwendolyn Brooks
Thro’ fetid swamps Basho drove his forces,
A filthy bunch of Scousers fell upon,
Had them tight-bound at their soft surrenders,
& order’d bayoneted one-by-one;
Blades wipen’d clean,
Under tropical moon,
They press on thro’ the steam to liberate Rangoon.
Thro’ monsoon & malaria,
With barely a bulldog stand,
The British army in Burma
Thro’ a jungle nightmare fann’d
“Yer on yer own fer India!”
The one clear-cut command…
Retreating, in fullness of confusion,
Leafy trails of chaos & destruction.
Basho cross’d the Irrawaddy,
Drove yon the border line,
Eyes sol-lit see raw junglerie
Upon the hills recline,
First bulwark of far-reaching Raj ‘neath Siva’s bleaching shine.
India
May
1942
Unread Letters
graves with girls.
taken too soon.
too brutal
Koleka Putuma
As Eleanor Stemmler felt herself good,
She couldn’t help but cringe beneath her hat,
Vile members of the Sicherheitsdienst stood
Behind her on the train, what awful chat!
As Russia fell
They’d roar’d all thro’ Ukraine
& drove the Jews to hell, two hundred thousand slain.
That night, with Max, she tried to share
This gossip from the sectors,
Horrescent rumours everywhere,
“Tis nothing but conjectures!”
Her husband huff’d, without a care,
Cold as debt collectors,
“But darling, what if, what if it’s all true?”
“But if it is, my love, what can we do?”
“My friend,” she said, “to Kaunus sent,
I’ve written twenty times…”
“Tis innocent, maybe they went
Elsewhere…” as midnight chimes,
Within the silence marital rise minds in violent crimes.
Berlin
June 2nd
1942
Australian Spit
Youth it enflames, but age it cheers,
I would go back, but not return
To twenty but to twice those yeers
Aurelian Townshend
‘The strongest man is mightiest alive,’
Remembers, each dawn, Shane Taylor Slater,
Determin’d, for his father, to survive,
Sensing chances come, sooner or later;
‘Til then, withstood,
All miseries & sun –
Like bluebells in a wood men wilted one-by-one.
To handle such sadistic sin,
Bear such crude brutality,
Phenomenal self-discipline,
Freed from personality,
Was vital, as with dog-bite grin,
Vanishes self-pity,
To live life in the present every day
& all those happy past-lives hold at bay.
For this is where true torture lies –
Not tied to bamboo cane,
Hounded by flies, as back & thighs
Bull-whipp’d by men insane –
Men’s captive reminscences bring them the upmost pain.
Burma
June 6th
1942
Midway
Our seraphs of white mercies
Shall hover around the ruin.
Their wings shall stream upon the flame
E.B.Browning
Nippon probes the fog-shrouded Aleutians
Those last, little islands near Hawaii,
Four flat-tops flying high the rising suns,
Their flagship, Yamamoto’s Akagi;
Up from the decks,
Like cranes leaving a lake,
Accelerant, convex, each ‘dauntless’ clouds uptake.
The dateline cross’d from east to west,
Men steel’d their hearts for valour,
Arising on horizon’s crest
Climbs the target carrier,
In single file planes faced the test,
As, at Balaclava,
The gunneries response is amplified
Crescendowards, ‘twas surely suicide.
The Yorktown sunk… by fate, by luck,
By broken naval codes,
Brewsters amuck those four ships struck,
& so, as Hampton Roads,
Those precious airstrips safely kept, the war’s one true crossroads.
Pacific Ocean
June 7th
1942
(AA) Canto 34: Impasse
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No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor, dumb bastard die for his country
George Scott
Inferiors
So then, to tell my story, here I stand.
The dress’s tint, though bleached in bitter dye,
Has not all washed away. It still is real.
Gertrud Kolmar
Since Wansee’s vow Nazis have maximis’d
Their social lordship over all the Jews,
Trapp’d in a den, as them dehumaniz’d
In piecemeal motions, widen’d by the news,
This slow process
Of expropriations,
Doubles each day’s duress, & its degradations.
From public pools prohibited,
Purchas’d newspapers denied,
Debarr’d from buying firewood,
Civic central kept outside,
Electricals confiscated
With telescopes, as died
The shining light of man’s modernity,
Portcullis closes for eternity.
On recremental lives deposed,
Like swine lacking odour,
Good schools are clos’d, warm homesteads hosed
Down with soapy water,
Evicted, cramm’d in hungry camps… cattle to the slaughter.
Germany
June
1942
Death of Heydrich
Only a tiny drill
Can turn into powder
The hardened one
Lelawattee Manoo-Rahming
King Wenceslas’ crown adorns the Hangman
Of Prague, who rules his province arrogant
Enough to be guarded by no real plan…
Thus went his Mercedes, his doom’s advent;
Two patriots
Plot assassination,
Sneak-bomb back’d up by shots… fear waltzes thro’ Tschechienne.
While all around the manhunt raged
Killers refuge in a crypt,
But still ruthless Gestapo gaug’d
Their whereabouts, & so tipp’d
Soldiers of the SS, engaged
This church as bullets ripp’d
Rank on rank from desperate defenders,
“Reserve your last bullets t’avoid tortures.”
Einsatzgruppen dealt the disgust
Of the German peoples,
Beaten & cuss’d, male peasants thrust
Inside cellars, stables,
There set alight, their homes destroy’d, their wives shot thro’ the skulls.
Lidice
June 9th
1942
Clandestine Protestations
I love to see thee bring to naught
The plans of wily men;
When simple hearts outwit the wise
Frederick William Faber
“The herd mentality has serv’d us well,
Irresolute & shallow as them led
Wither we are leading, Heaven or hell!”
“It matters not, as long as them well fed
By daily trucks,
Diets of galling stones,
Which grab & cut & suck soft marrow from hard bones.”
Like children, in untutor’d throng,
Overbrushing what looks strange,
Good women, sensing things were wrong,
Felt powerless of change,
But thro’ Von Moltke blew a song
Tho’ dangerous in range,
Solanaceaen intelligentsia
Clambors up from cellars, & together!
Helmuth advis’d the High Command
With secret plans to skew,
His name demands each shame disbands
With sisyphean due,
Not, “what you do’s horrendous,” but, “what does it gain for you?“
Berlin
June 26th
1942
FC Start
Never say no to any
Delight which your life bestows.
Grasp it with hungry senses!
Ingeborg Flood
Kizmenko was march’d inside the warehouse
Known by the name Bakery Number Five,
His countrymen as quiet as a mouse,
Just happy to be working & alive;
With joy he saw
Friends from the Dynamo,
& by them on the floor, Lokomotiv Moscow!
As certain persons of this world
Live life as they are meant to
The flag of FC Start unfurl’d,
Russian red & Ukraine blue,
As team thro’ intense training hurl’d
Such expectations grew –
& in the end, whatever might befall,
These dusty kickabouts sooth’d heart & soul!
Upon a happy summer’s day
When dreamer’s lived the dream,
Nazi leeway, they’ll get to play
Romanian starcream,
& goal-by-goal dismantled them, such was their splendid team.
Kiev
July
1942
White Rose Bloom
Whilst fearful battle breaks at dead of night
Heroes ! rise & play your part
The stars will lead you with their friendly light
Roger Scicluna
As darker powers seas & shorelines weave,
Releas’d from their subboreal syndrome,
Hans Scholl & Alex Schmorell frontlines leave,
Disjointing from the bucks that first left home;
Compell’d to write
Leaflets of common sense,
To flog & put to flight cognitive dissonance.
They quoted, quite extensively,
Novalis, Aristotle,
To castigate the bourgouisie
Goethe, Schiller – terrible
Truths told of Fascist Germany –
Most unfathomable
T’would be if Hitler were to win his wars –
Form leaflets mail’d thro’ academic doors.
First Von Moltke read the letter,
Then read it three times oer,
Subnubilar to Luminar
He found a dozen more,
& sent them all to Stockholm for reprintment, spore on spore.
Berlin
July
1942
The Russian Front
the vegetation is of iron
dead tanks, gun barrels split like celery
the metal brambles have no flowers or berries
Keith Douglas
Ravenous warfare, widening regions,
Town hall dominoes sporting swastikas,
Lungbursting songs of conquering legions,
Interrogateries & massacres;
We’ve never seen
A battle of its ilk,
Blood-bolter’d gallow-queen enrob’d in sallow silk.
Tho’ northern impasse yet remain’d,
That lock of arms humungous,
Destruction of the South unchain’d
By supercharg’d invaders,
Another mass of mileage gain’d,
But, with less surrenders –
Thro’ battle’s college wiser men are born,
The Red Army was skillfully withdrawn.
“Get me Von Paulus on the phone!”
“Mein Fuhrer?” “You must take
Stalingrad – ALL of it must fall!”
Gen’rals groan’d in the wake,
“Silence, my will insconced in fate, the Bolshevik must break.”
Vinnitsa
July 23rd
1942
Camp Eingost
And now I know what ails the world: Power
Humility dies on its very own emaciated neck
Even cockroaches rise
Rira Abbasi
Life weary, yet life loves to linger on,
At least in Warsaw some know family,
One restless morn th’ess-ess form a cordon,
Shunting away the old ones, forcibly;
“You will be sent
To safe & special camp,”
But reality meant extinguishing life’s lamp.
The Starbearers pack’d tight without
Water nor ventilation,
Days trundle by ’til rough shout “Out!”
A primitive train station,
Old Hersz is fill’d with gnawing doubt
At the explanation
That for these showers they must strip to skin,
He kiss’d his Kaiser’s cross & crept within.
The Harikvah soon screaming roar,
As hissing swirl’d the gas,
Squirm, writhe & claw… alive no more
They search’d each mouth & ass,
& form’d possession-mountains, ditching deep the warm corpses.
Treblinka
July 22nd
1942
Desert Surge
With grey arm twisted over a green face
The dust of passing trucks swirls over him,
Lying by the roadside in his proper place
Gavin Ewart
On a day suffocating & stormy,
Resplendent bloom’d the Rose of Jericho,
Til’ crush’d beneath grinding machinery
Of Afrikans advancing row by row;
Led by Rommel,
Darling of the masses,
To conquer the Kanal & claim the Caucasus.
With flair & flourish he attack’d
Scudding hard & calcin’d earth,
Battle’s hot, corrosive impact
His to steer by right of birth,
Tobruk’s quicksand captured intact,
Much bloodspill marks it’s worth,
A port from which a warring conqueror
Could drive the British out of Africa.
To Alamein the Eighth withdraw,
Digging-in defences,
Midst Cairo’s War th’embassadour
Urns his secret papers.
As the Fleet, from Alexandria, flees for safer harbours.
Egypt
August 7th
1942
Malta Starved
‘See you tomorrow, then.’ Tomorrow,
it is certain, never comes.
Evasions & delays recur
Macedonius the Consul
There was no spring in Malta, forty-two,
Nothing lives on a nervous volcano,
When waters fresh tainted by dusty dew
In blown by senses-seizing scirocco;
No food to spare,
Guarding pets with shotguns,
& only prickly pear replac’d those sunken tonnes;
When siren sounds incessantly
When, rampant, typhus fever,
When fighters bare from Italy
& no-one dare relieve her,
This princess isle this of liberty,
Even best believer
Grew weary at the hunger & the drain,
Til Mass restores each heart with stoic strain.
How long can an honest nation
Bide her tongue & suffer?
Thirst, starvation, no salvation,
Oer grim futures hover –
When lacking arks of flour & oil; comes, soon, cruel surrender!
Malta
August
1942
(AA) Canto 35: War Rage
**************************************
I cannot, I do not wish to die.
I love life – I love this grass, this earth, this air
Tolstoy
Game of Death
Learn by our friendship to create
An immaterial fire,
Whose brightnesse Angels may admire
Thomas Stanley
“Come mother, the match is kicking off soon!”
Shouts Konstantin, blood-rushing FC Start,
Whistling a happy Ukranian tune,
Sweet strains of which were nestled deep in heart;
Heroes emerge
Behind great Trusevich,
Onto the grassy verge, then spread around the pitch!
Eleven versus eleven,
Hitler white & Stalin red,
As the Russian Number Seven
Scores a bullet with his head,
Konstantin was shot to heaven,
A year of fears far fled…
Free kick fies from the foot of Kuzmenko!
& now, at last, the ball finds Klimenko,
Who dribbles around the goalie,
But choosing not to score
He hoofs it screaming skillfully
Back to the midfield four –
Hysterical with pride the Stiltskis ride the thunder-roar.
Kiev
August 9th
1942
Operation Pedestal
& only the drowned hears
stay calm –
& obeys, not the drowning
Henneh Kyereh Kwaku
A convoy pass’d the safety of the straits,
Sailors survey’d the scene as once did Scott,
But his soiree was not left to the fates,
That tranquil sea tempest of shell & shot;
No man dared bunk
The plan steam’d on & on,
As ship-by-ship was sunk twixt Skerki & Cape Bon.
The war roll’d on right furious;
Malta’s harvest, all afloat,
Hard beset by swarms of stukas
& Davidian E-Boat,
Throwing hell at the destroyers,
Whose carrier support
Fought out long running battles down the Med,
For oil & fruit, for vegetables & bread.
Above Valetta’s long main street
Into the boiling sky,
Six Spitfires meet, to save the fleet
They could but only try,
As west, into those jaws of death, they could but only fly.
The Mediterranean Sea
August 13th
1942
Forcing Divisions
Every one feels dread;
Every bird wings to its mate.
Every thing springs through the earth
Aneirin
A summons, screaming demons in red ink,
Sent to the Spiegelmans, Vladek look’d numb,
“What is it, love?” her husband pour’d a drink,
“All Jews must go to the Dienst stadium…”
To go no good,
Not to go no better,
So join’d the fleshy flood before the gauleiter.
Whole families forc’d to divide
Kids & old folks to the left,
The right side clearly the right side
Where the young & strongest sift
Vladek watch’d as his sister tried
Five spirits to uplift
Her children, fatherless now, three long years
Among them now their grandpapa appears….
“Dad!” Anna shouts, he was just here
With us!” “He must have snook
Across…” a fear descended drear
Elsewhere the ‘left’ were took
Gone with a wave, a nod of head, & one last love-fill’d look.
Sosnowiec
Aug 20th
1942
Operation Edelweiss
Lord, these are Thine! With soldierly tread
Without a tremor they go their way,
Singing a hymn they march ahead
Lucian Watkins
Three Oberstdorfers face their greatest test
Driving, higher, vision after vision
Blend ‘Nil mortalibus ardui est,’
With the 21st Mountain Division;
Their Reich war flag
Into a rucksack squeez’d,
Heel-leaps starting to drag as conversation wheez’d.
Beyond the pass of Chotju-Tau
The Caucasus were climbing
A simple case of here & now
As when the bards start rhyming
& magic, confiscating now,
Pearls with perfect timing,
There’s poetry immortal, & the heart
Yearns nature’s best breathtaking works of art.
Western Eurasia’s highest ground
Conquer’d by Germany
The bag was found – with slapping sound
The flag was flapping free,
A deed, indeed, piquing the company of Calliope.
Mount Ebro
Aug 23
1942
Stalin’s City
My dish, my tumbler,
here in the tin-plate
I’ve scratched my name
Günter Eich
The Sixth Army thunders to the Volga,
The Swastika hoisted over Elbrus,
In front – unending acres of Asia,
Behind – the widest wake of conquerors;
Resting their flank
Upon the deep, dark Don,
Onwards advanced each tank, onwards & ever on!
With sleeves roll’d up, sporting short pants,
On mountain slope stood Willie,
Watching apartments, parks & plants
Of this white cubist city,
The first hint of caution supplants
Invincibility!
For infesting the city & the plain,
The Red Army seems set to fight again.
Above shored-up defences pour
Fourth Richtofen Air Fleet,
Planes by the score have brought the War
To level ev’ry street,
The will Man gains to resist ills soul-temper’d in the heat.
Stalingrad
August 23rd
1942
Montgomery
The Ark waits,
Lord,
the Ark waits on Your will
Carmen Bernos De Gasztold
The world is at arms, the world is ablaze,
Nigh ev’ry man now forced to choose a side,
What days are these? These are darkest of days,
Stripping a man of dignity & pride;
The battle lines
To breaking point pull’d taut,
Der Fuhrer’s grand designs to be or be distraught.
Churchill threw the pink-skinn’d Monty
On imperial mission,
Stood before the beige Eighth army,
“We must win by attrition,
Defend the Nile from the blue sea
Down to the Depression…”
His troops entering oaseas of calm
In whose auspices they must face no harm.
All round the village rose the purr
Of Shermans beautiful
With knowing burr, the spirits stir,
“Sole way to slay Rommel…
Dig ‘em in along Alem el Halfa at the double!”
El Alamein
August 25th
1942
El Alamein
Waiting for the end, boys, waiting for the end.
What is there to be or do?
What’s become of me or you?
William Empson
Stiff-borne by dreams from his fade-worn Fuhrer,
Fraught by an all-expectant Germany,
Ill on the air of the wide, wide Delta,
The Pyramids in immediacy;
Rommel orders
His neurasthenic men,
“Boys, rev up the panzers, advance them once again.”
Droving North of the Quattara
These iron-clad caravans
Rode the ridge Alem el Halfa
To the Somuan Shermans
Hanging tough – from sandy shelter
Shells titubated plans;
He paus’d, the pale moon growing paler still,
Up from the south warm sandstorms shriek & shrill.
Dust settles on a dead terrain,
Enmein’d with armour’d hulk,
Glancing in pain, long lists of slain,
“A tanker has been sunk…”
He took the news heart-sighing, “Call it off!” & left to sulk.
Jabel Kalakh
September 3rd
1942
Order of the Red Star
We shall go along roads beneath the stars,
so that Plotsk straightens its shoulders,
so that Poznan shall know freedom
Sergei Narovchatov
These unreal times, this petrifactive age,
When impudence of Nazi kings impinge
On Mother Russia, who great war will wage,
Wreaking the bloody claret of revenge;
A nation’s fate
Upon its fight insists –
To hound, exterminate invaders with mail’d fist.
Women in their millions dress
For liberty thro’ battle,
Meeting ‘Monsters of Wickedness,’
Embracing, fanatical,
Ev’ry danger, every duress,
Ev’ry heretical
Enemy, what deep love for Russia grows,
Unfolding with their passion for the cause.”
As throats enamel’d sing, “for me
A meter dig of soil,”
Gethsemane’s fresh family
Prepares to disembroil
Their country from the chaos of the Nazi’s vast despoil.
Tula
September 13th
1942
Black Gold
Whither, unfortunate wretch, have I strayed,
Thus of thy bounty to lie disinherited –
I alone whilst every other is paid?
Publius Papinius Statius
A flight of spitfire falls from sommer sky,
Lands as precisely as migrating drake
On isles astride the highway of supply,
All alone in this hostile Axis lake;
Thro’ constant fire,
Urged on by deep belief
That crown’d heads of empire must send to them relief.
Harbours of expectant children
By sad & weary farmers,
Drop-swap nervous conversation
Cheering for the Port Chalmers,
The Stars of Melbourne & Brisbane,
Clad in shatter’d armours –
Survivors of this keystone of the war,
Then the Rochester Castle made them four!
The convoy limp’d, or tow’d to port,
Join’d by vital tanker,
Tho’ ten ships short brave sailors brought
Salvation to anchor,
Soon submarines refuel’d scented Axis ship & sank her!
The Mediterranean Sea
September 15th
1942
(AA) Canto 36: Steadfastnesses
**************************************
The most persistent sound which reverberates through man’s history is the beating of war drums
Arthur Koestler
Prisoners
I carried the false spirit force of sadness
wrapped in a brown sack in the pocket
of a worn, tweed coat
Adrian C. Louis
Humiliated by subhuman skill
The master race enacts its casting vote,
Feeling unsatisfied with a quick kill
They choose instead constriction by the throat;
So drag their prey
To Korolenko Street,
“Lets make them rue the day they damn’d us in defeat!”
Kuzmenko is the first to cry
Bull-clubb’d to the ground & shot,
Around Klimenko nail-fists fly,
Til left by bullets to rot,
Shouting, “Red sport will never die!”
Trusevich marks his spot,
Stood proud & tall in his goalkeeper green,
Soon blood-stain’d in the Babi-Yar ravine.
The news filter’d to the outside,
Dishearten’d Konstantin,
Deflated pride went to confide
With mother in an inn,
“Worry not,” opin’d Christina , “The final we must win.”
Kiev
September
1942
Operation Watchtower
Nay, I protest, though Death with his
Worst Counsel should divide us here,
His terrors could not make me fear
Lord Herbert of Cherbury
America, at last, enters battle,
Aslant volcanic isle rainforested,
Strange & stagnant, humid, pestilential,
By lizards & swarm’d insects infested;
When bugles blare,
Comes forth the fierce attack,
Banzais scything thro air silenced by CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!
Men throttl’d with furious rage
Midst the giant hardwood trees,
Mottl’d by squawking foliage,
Warm swamp-waters tickling knees,
Where, fell’d by Wars that others wage,
Full riddl’d with disease’
The last thing many marines would have seen
Were piercing chrystals’ fanatical glean!
Up, up went Nippon’s battlecry
Along the Bloody Ridge,
“Banzai!” “Banzai!” “Maline you die!”
Six hard days of carnage,
But like brave Barnes at Gettysburg defenders would not budge.
Guadalcanal
September 14th
1942
Urban Crucible
It isn’t me, someone else is suffering. I couldn’t.
Not like this. Everything that has happened,
Cover it with a black cloth
Anna Akhmatova
Paulus puts down the phone on der Fuhrer,
Flame-eyed gen’rals await its decision,
“Incontent for us to reach the Volga,
Each brick of this damn’d city must be won!”
With cautious voice
He order’d the advance,
Restricted of all choice, condemn’d to court with chance.
Immazed the Drang Nach Osten’s flow
All in the armpit carcass,
This hellish huge, grey grain silo,
Held by ragged defenders,
Dread lingers in the vast shadow,
Wylde shots blast at noises –
Where rages vicious hand-to-hand combat
In sewer, stairwell, cellar, shop-front, flat.
Pity the poor civilian,
Courageous troglodyte,
An alien subt’ranean
Defending its birthright,
This is its city, its property, its striving, its fight.
Stalingrad
September 19th
1942
Arctic Circle
It is fitting to mourn dead sailors,
To crown the sea with some wild wreath of foam
On some steep promontory
Vernon Watkins
The ice-encrusted look-out grew entranced,
Burnley’s ain blinking hyperborean,
A glowing polar coast capp’d the distance,
Snow-realms of Thule’s half-light Cimmerian;
Ship’s shadows plough’d
Northwards with proper care,
Rolling, pitching thro’ cloud, spray freezing in the air.
Jack Sumner shouts, day-in, day-out,
His convoy runs the gauntlet,
Batter’d & scatter’d by the kraut,
With many a sinking threat,
But well the British gunners fought,
Bursting the minefield net,
To be spotted by their Russian raven,
Who’d escort them safely to this haven.
They’d enter the ghostly harbour,
Discharge their martial bread,
Helping Russia hack down Hitler
In terrible bloodshed,
Then drown’d their thin-fray’d nerves with vodka in a drinking shed.
Archangel
September
1942
Crux
In the ruins a small light flickers,
there is someone alive there,
a fire clenched between his teeth
Iunna Morits
The Kremlin’s air grew heavy with the fate
Of the Russian empire & Stalin’s fame
S’tho standing at the Corinthian gate,
“We must save the city, she bares my name…
Not one step back!”
The motherland’s last hope
Shall beat back the attack, some Sumo at the rope.
Many a penal battalion
Ythrust into the battle,
Trapt twixt a foreign machine gun
& the Kommissar’s pistol,
How they charged in desperation,
Miracle survival…
Getting to grips as quickly as they could
Ev’ry second shedding Soviet blood.
The lucky few punctured the lines,
Cold steel coldly applied,
The siren whines, th’assault resigns
& when the blood had dried
One hundred Ruskis slept breathless but ten schweinhunds had died…
Stalingrad
October
1942
Innocent Blood
The Sun of Justice may withdraw his beams
Awhile from earthly ken, & sit conceal’d
In dark recess pavilioned round with clouds
George Bally
Kim was a slave! dragg’d from deep Korea
With countrymen he’d never met before,
Control’d by rifle butts, insults & fear,
Compell’d to help his masters with their war;
His island’s thrall
Another planet seem’d,
“Goddamn it!” Sergeant Hall, dreaming in the sunbeams,
“This place is hot!” “Sir, over there!”
“What?” “Asian looking fella…”
“Well shoot him then!” “But he don’t wear
No uniform?” “Private Mellor,
What clothes they wearin’ I don’t care,
S’long as he looks yella,
We’ll kill him ‘til this hell-hole’s neutraliz’d!”
The servant to the situation siz’d,
This galling deed has to be done
& rais’d an aim at Kim,
“I’m sorry son…” from shaking gun
A bullet rak’d thro’ him,
Dismantl’d from Humanity thro’ vanity & whim.
Guadalcanal
October
1942
Sand Lines
If you tear down the web I said
It will simply know
This isn’t a place to call home
Fady Joudah
Empire’s chains broken by the outlawry,
Exquisite lamps of freedom bars unbolt
From Taranaki to Tobermory…
But yet dig-in lads round some railway hut;
El Alamein
Hosts see-saw battles tense,
The weak-link of a chain or brinkflop subsequence.
As heavenforth the barrage spews
The flames of red of horizons
Cacophonies of carnage chews
The shells from a thousand guns
Announcing thats the Reich renews
Conquest with its weapons,
Whose panzers into power motion crank,
Whose drivers steer’d ivory-tower’d tank
Ears full of voices, wading thro,’
The voids of battletide,
When War’s just you, your tiny crew
& slitting lightshow slide,
When color in the sunlight rushes film-flash by outside.
October
Egypt
1942
American Achilles
The march gone by was glorious, this shall be
More glorious still. To one & all of ye
I speak.- Remember well what is done
JD Horrocks
Before three thousand Sendai Japanese
John Basilone led only two sections
Peppering machine gun posts thro’ the trees
Off-fending, with brutal vivisections;
Howls, rants & screams
In-hemming every side
While bullets flew in streams the bloodrops never dried.
Three days of neverstop attacks,
While rapid dwindle rations,
John dropping ninjas on their backs,
&, after the assassins,
Day dons, three nights, it’s jacket blacks,
Starsplash buttons fastens,
‘Til at the end him left with just two boys,
Face nothing but the hum of jungle noise.
For this is how a hero looks,
Cover them in glory,
Etch in thy books when at the crux,
Perilous & gory,
They fought by immortality writing down their story.
Henderson Field
October 25th
1942
Operation Supercharge
They were our comrades
Crowned with their youth;
See what they gave!
Tancred Agius
As dogged as at La Haye Saint they fought,
With sullen eyes fix’d on the blasted earth
For sudden shapes & shadows, target sought
Then caught them with a ‘fucking army’s worth;’
Six panzers cast
Amang the hummocks soft
Deliver dumb disaster while the caps were doff’d
To Monty in his element
Whose murd’rous mechanisms
Shall masticate all Germans sent
Sculpt waxwork paroxysms
E’er witherwards the Wehrmacht senr
Follows fatalisms
Shredded bodies burnt & mutilated,
But no! Death’s scythe’s not yet satiated.
“Napoleon once rode thro’ here!”
The shrinking sergeant said,
Whose single tear sprain crystal clear
Then on the sands was shed,
“This land is only bred for death…” bled out & join’d the dead.
Elaqqaqir
Nov 1
1942
(AA) Gl’Immortali IV
These things, then, the Muses sang who dwell on Olympus, nine daughters begotten by great Zeus, Cleio and Euterpe, Thaleia, Melpomene and Terpsichore, and Erato and Polyhymnia and Urania and Calliope, who is the chiefest of them all, for she attends on worshipful princes
Hesiod
Immortal Embassy
The lights of heaven are shut in pitchy clouds
And flakes of fire run tilting through the sky
Like dim ostents to some great tragedy
Thomas of Woodstock
To the lofty shock of the golden guard,
Mephistophilis appear’d at Bifrost,
“You may,” says Heimdall, “pass into Asgard…”
Where, after splendid Ithavol was cross’d,
Welcom’d abroad
Was Satan’s embassy,
Splendid-scented abode plays host to victory!
Old Odin drank into night,
Quaffing barrels of beer
Toasting the highlights of the fight
With the Cockrelle musketeer,
As all at once the air grew tight
The Daemon drools a sneer;
“Aesir, I bring an offer from my lord
Together let’s put Pyerun to the sword!”
Sits there, Odin, undecided,
To drag the wars on more,
“Sire, be counted,” Loki whisper’d,
“& settle an old score,”
In silence sinks the One-Eyed One, then smiles, then nods at Thor.
Valhalla
Promise of Jove
My God! I will address Thee
In loudest hymns of praise;
Then, too, my soul shall bless Thee
Synyesius
Gods gathering around Ignatius
Pray with the Saint upon the Bark & Cope,
While solem psalms sung by Quirinius
Seem as if pew’d in Saint Pauls near the Pope;
“Where art thou Jove?”
The congregation yearns,
Melodious they strove as every hymn-note burns.
“Who lives in love loves least to live
& a long delay dost rue,
If Him we loved will us forgive,
Him to whom all praise is due,
Then evil from our souls shall sieve
& give those souls to You –
Come show the world your spirit, still, is strong!”
Disturbs, Archangel Gabriel, this song…
“As God made man by image seen
So share, the Gods, men’s faults,
& if was seen, by movie screen,
The narcissistic schmaltz
Of Hitler, Jove would crackle anger flung as lightning bolts!
Earth
Evil Empire
A terrible change is come: I see a cloud
Brooding over the valley like the wing
Of a destroying angel dark & dread
CL Reddell
Midgard play’d host to the Leviathan;
As Hydra Demagorgons held the land,
From ocean trench surfaces the Kraken,
It’s tentacles encreeping under sand;
To stand apart,
Sucking the islands dry
Of harvest, hope & heart, while watchful Wyvrns fly.
Satanus call’d a grand counsel
To discuss the growing war,
Along the high road into Hell
Rode the company of Thor,
Announced by the doom-peeling bell,
Led thro th’ivory door,
Presented ‘fore the princely throne of bone,
“All Asia guarded by Pyerun alone.”
“We will be strong Lord Lucifer
& compensate thy flanks…”
Lone warrior in black armour
Strode clanking thro’ the ranks,
“My name is Barbarossa, for this battle offer thanks.”
Pandemonium
Babababgorath
I see beyond all words his future shape,
Its feet upon the carcass of the ape
& round its mighty head, prophetic birds
Thomas Blackburn
Updripping from the scum of Avernus
The Proud Aspirer seems a giant ram
O wrath-swollen dragon of Satanus
Lurching to feast upon the holy Lamb;
Such flaggy wings
Stretch from his brazen back
While innum’rable things hiss thro a fissure crack.
The Worm unfurls his scaly tail,
His monstrous body rumbles,
Wings flapping as a mainyard sail,
While stinking sulphur grumbles –
Steaming from teeth stain’d gobbet stale –
Out some sinner tumbles,
Screaming in desperation at his crimes
A frail endtimer at the end of times.
To battle goes the Lizard King
Across Vesuvo’s waste,
Now half-footing, now half-flying,
To Heaven in his haste,
The hordes of Hell behind him in the glow of hate encased.
Ausonia
Love’s Hope
The hot desires burn low, and wan
Those ashy fires, that flamed anon.
The stars have twinkled, and gone out
John Galsworthy
A river courses thro’ a horseful plain,
Carriageing one golden strand of Venus,
On its fibres a precious, faint bloodstain,
Ingraining the best of her essences;
Europa’s shore
Watches Thetis make play,
Where peasant waters pour into a crescent bay.
As Merman scouts the outer seas,
He spies a velvety thread,
Escorts it thro’ the coral trees
To where old Dagon rested,
& plants it on the snoring wheeze
Of Neptune, bare-chested,
It-locking in an airy, lucid dome,
Now blown off spinning thro’ the under-foam.
Hair lands inside an oyster shell,
Jaws quiver as they close,
Ambrosial mother of pearl,
As soft as spring time snows,
Hushes her magic as the fibre to a wylde rose grows.
Oceania
Barbarossa Dawn
Now stoops the sun, & dies day’s cheerful light.
When stars tread forth, intone this two-tongued folk,
Standing with firebrands, hymns of sacrifice
CM Doughty
Satanus advances slowly for Heaven
The Gods, like scuttling rats, flee from his feet
Jove’s treachery never once forgotten
As thrust-by-thrust his vengeances did meet;
By black-cloth sun
Moons flew in blood red hide,
All was devastation, & deadly deicide.
At the point of concentration
Hells black legions forced to wait
Til upon the south orison
Camst the Aesir one month late
Says Odin my humblest pardon
But we were tricked by fate
To battle do with Pyerun’s minions
Amidst the Transylvanian mountains
But we are come now Lucifer
To compensate thy flanks
Lone warrior in black armour
Strode clanking thro the ranks
His name is Barbarossa for this battle gives you thanks
Europa
Murder Momentous
in the voice of the wind
in the surge of the sea
in the Aspect & the Being
Antonio Jacinto
Three Rainbow Wyvrn, sleekly serpentine,
Hear the entrancing chords of the Shinto,
Summon’d to Fujiyama’s sacred shrine
Where waited Bishamon, coal eyes aglow;
Astride the back
Of rare, mystical steed…
He orders an attack, over the seas they speed…
At the heart of a silver sea
They came on a volcano
Slumbering in tranquillity
Was the eagle of Hino,
They fell on him in wylde fury,
Bird whimpers as they go…
Three days later spotted by Gabriel,
Stripp’d of plumage, voice tringing madrigal…
Neon-swath’d towers scrape the sky
Beneath the spangl’d stars
Hino’s heart’s cry, Sam’s soulful sigh
Swept from a throne of cars,
“The time has come for battle & a war to end all wars!”
Americana
A Season in Hell
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Balrog, chief cause & culprit of these rhymes,
Tours the seven circles of Satanus,
Meph’ found him with the broken-hearted crimes,
“Our lord bids thee return to Cocytus!”
With hugeous urge
Of his wing gigantic,
Hades sways to the surge rippling forth concentric.
Roaming over dismember’d souls
Astrew the fiery cavern,
Yon Caina, Judeccan falls,
Lands by the Anti-Heaven,
Striding along skeletal halls
Toward the cloven one –
The pair well met, aft converse serpentine
They saunter thro’ dungeons incarnadine,
Where imps collect the crimson goo,
Long in labours wheeling,
When these first few drops from the Jew
Weepeth from the ceiling,
Ghouls sing Carmen Cruenta to the crude Doom Bell’s peeling.
Pandemonium
Holy Waters
The sea shall seethe like boiling casserole,
Change colors, taking on unnatural form,
Showing its ill will at full blast to all
Ausiàs March
Uncle Sam sat enthroned with Liberty
Upon the voyage East to Albion,
Entertain’d elegantly pleasantly
By his royal emissary, Dagon;
Relaxed, despite
The stern vein of that day,
How soon the deadly fight, how soon the frightful fray?
Little did those deities know
That out of the stagnant Styx,
A fleet of foul Sea-Devils flow,
So vicious in vilesome mix,
The brave Mermen could only slow
The foe with eye-glow fixt
Upon a shimmering, sun-brush’d surface,
Up to that barge they roar in dorkish race!
Neptune appears & checks progress
With trident, crown & shield,
Grim devils press their gruesomeness,
But Gods will rarely yield,
Soon corpses float about him in a liquid battlefield.
Oceania
(AA) Canto 37: Titans
**************************************
It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we should grow too fond of it
Robert E. Lee
Stretching Point
God of our fathers, what is man!
That thou towards him with hand so various…
Temper’st thy providence through his short cause
John Milton
Monty’s patience has come to juicy fruit
A well-nourish’d plum swelling on the stem
That fully pluck’d attacking follows suit,
“Kill the Germans wherever you find them!”
None to the wise,
Der Fuhrer’s fav’rite son
Receives his precious prize, the field marshal’s baton!
News breaks, by condor scurries back,
His beleaguer’d Afrikans
Batter’d, attack after attack
Bombards the Devils Gardens,
Thro’ hard-hack’d gaps the British stack,
Th’impervious shermans –
Days & nights & days the tussle flosses,
But Hitler can’t replace Rommel’s losses.
Dam bursts about his last panzers,
Oil starving in the sand,
No more chances, backwards glances
Gazed hopeful for Deutschland –
Such things we ordinary mortals hardly understand.
Egypt
November 2nd
1942
Secret Landing
March to the battle-field,
The foe is now before us ;
Each heart is freedom’s shield
B.E. O’Meara
Tho’ well & good, youth craves not life’s dull calm
In lone felucca, oozing sardine stench
Went Aimee Gardner, Odette from the farms
Of Quimper, now, returns to help the French
Get rid of those
Who dare to act a king
Where Liberty still grows, tho’ with a broken wing
They slipp’d into a silent bay
Splintering Riviera
Into a dinghy heav’d their way
Francois, Hugh, Jack & Sarah
With Aimee, who, in her own way
Never look’d so fairer
The crimson of adventure in her veins
Upon the rising tide she beach obtains
Whose fresh, soft footsteps sunk in sand
Faded, wash’d by waters,
Rushing to land, band after band
Of white surf, her daughters
Forgotten both, thoughts focus’d all on what our train’s taught us…
Cote D’Azore
Nov 2nd
1942
El Alamein
When the bullets came in a hail,
bubbling up in the bare sand,
he remembered Inverkeithing
Sorley Maclean
Stiff-borne by dreams from his fade-worn Fuhrer,
Fraught by an all-expectant Germany,
Ill on the air of the lion-pelt Delta,
The Pyramids in immediacy;
Rommel orders
His neurasthenic men,
“Boys, rev up the panzers, advance them once again.”
Droving North of the Quattara,
These iron-clad caravans
Rode the ridge Alem el Halfa
To the Somuan Shermans,
Hanging tough – from shabby shelter
Shells titubated plans;
He paus’d, the pale moon growing paler still,
Up from the south warm sandstorms shriek & shrill.
Dust settles on a dead terrain,
Enmein’d with armour’d hulk,
Glancing in pain, long lists of slain,
“A tanker has been sunk…”
He took the news heart-sighing, “Call it off!” & left to sulk.
Jabel Kalakh
November 3rd
1942
Into Action
When or where did the ancient world, or ours,
Ever see such lively, ever feel such pure
Light coming out of dark ink
Giambattista Marino
Old masters torn from walls, from old chateaux
To humble huts, invisible hatred
Awaits the reawakening, a cause
Not unforesaken, Amy breaks the bread;
A jug of wine
Sunlight clips the table,
“How are you!” “I’m quite fine…” “My name’s Peter Churchill,”
But here I’m Gaston…” ‘quite pretty,’
Thought he, as she smooth’d lipstick
Oer kissable lips, chemistry
Tingles both… “Listen, the trick
Is act with naturality,”
He gave his fringe a flick,
“From one’s common occurrences transcend,
On tiny details many lives depend.”
The vassal farce of Vichy France
Dissolves that very day
All sides advance in arrogance
The dirty Wehrmacht grey,
“Things might turn out tad tougher now…” smil’d Peter, “you don’t say.”
Cannes
Nov 11th
1943
Problem Solvers
The worst kind of infortune is this, –
A man that hath been in prosperitie,
And it remember whan it passed is
Geoffrey Chaucer
Sinking neath the weight of this fresh burden,
Fork pois’d, flicking thro this fatal cable,
Sate Hitler, that staunch vegetarian,
No vulgar corpse ever graced his table;
He starts to shake,
Meal squashes to the floor
With footsteps in a quake stamps shrieking more & more.
“Get me Von Paulus on the phone!”
“Fuhrer, we are surrounded!”
“You must stay in that battlezone,
DO NOT BREAK OUT!” astounded,
That Field-Marshall despairs did moan
As his heart’s hopes flounder’d,
“But tell me how my men shall be supplied?”
“By flights of Luftwaffe,” Goering replied.
“Then that is settl’d,” Hitler spake,
Trusting his winner’s sense,
“It’s make or break, don’t fudge or flake,
Conducting the defence,
Move in & hold the city, a relief I’ll send thee hence.”
Wolf’s Lair
November 22nd
1942
Breaking Point
The great Soviet people in a headlong rush
of fiery lave will wipe out the fascist gang.
Wipe them out ! And leave no traces
Boris Shmidt
The River Don, held by Romanians,
Precious protectors of supply’s long lines,
Whose ranks beef’d up by brash Hungarians,
Content to keep out cold with warming wines
& cups of schnapps…
As falls the snowy chrome,
Thoughts frozen under caps, still paintings of a home.
Blustering blizzards start the day
As over the ice floes pitch
Arm’d Russians & their countersway
Twyx stark Serafimovic
& Kletskaya’s russet clay,
Above each Donside ditch
Soldiers appear in an avenging surge
Those silhouetted angels on the verge.
Like gas explosion from a mine
These modern Cossacks spread
Their bulging lines of battle, pine
Fresh widows for the dead
In Bucharest & Budapest, on corpses crows well fed.
Eurasia
November 19th
1942
Nuclear Advent
Marble walls of palaces,
Iron bars of dungeons,
You break through them all
Alter Esselin
Einstein has warn’d Rooseveldt directly,
“The unspeakable fury of the Bomb,”
A project given top priority,
Harnessing the power of the atom;
“No better man
Our vision to protect
Let Oppenheimer man the Manhattan Project.”
He led them to Los Alamos
Transfiguring the future
Fastidious, the uberboss
Of this nuclear sutra
Up flicks a coin upon a toss,
Chancing fate as Teucer
Led from Crete his fleet of Proto-Trojans
Despis’d, denied, by the theologians.
The coin spins upwards on a rise,
Tis simple heads or tails,
To dream, devise, actualise,
Harness the murd’rous gales
Even, perhaps, oblivion if calculation fails.
Chicago
November
1942
Perversions
Who breathe only when allowed
Who talk only when allowed
Who rest only when allowed
Elizabeth L. A. Kamara
Three schweinerei with nothing else to do
Kidnap three sisters skipping down the street
Dresses rip-torn at Gestapo HQ,
Cesspool where evils deeds & demons meet;
The time & place
Recall as World War Two,
Whose bastard Master Race like madness prosper’d thro.
Naked but for his boots & cap,
The Obersturmbannfuhrer
Slams down her strugglings on his lap,
& down her throat pour’d vodka,
Heard all the while the SLAP-SLAP-SLAP
Of thighs, youngest sister
Weeping as she was raped, while the older
Fending off every fondle, grows bolder
To kick & scratch, she bit & claw’d,
Like kitten’d alleycat,
By gunbutt floor’d, the law restor’d
“We’ll have no more of that,”
The Obersturmbannfuhrer hiss’d while spinning off his hat.
Brussels
November
1942
Counter Attack!
I am not strong, no soldier, no hero,
but if I look back, behind me is 1942,
behind me Stalingrad.
Galina Nikolaeva
How brutal when two granite wills collide,
Men kick’d to death defending an ideal,
The Red Army has trawl’d the nation wide
For fodder to feed into Hades’ wheel;
Adolf Hitler
Remains, tho’ devil’s kin,
Pettiest dictator in the times of Stalin.
As winter gales pile up the snow
Still struggle on the soldiers,
Half-frozen far below zero –
Von Paulus, thro’ field-glasses,
Views flares; a sent up, signal glow,
By vital rescuers –
“Achtung!” across the Wehrmacht’s flimsy flanks –
Roar lethal rows, lextalionic tanks!
As PANIC acquires grave station
Spreading her pungent breeze –
Chain reaction, six-months gains gone,
World-conqueror far flees,
But for the Sixth, that wounded Knight, trapp’d on its bleeding knees.
Stalingrad
December 22nd
1942
(AA) Canto 38: Evelations
**************************************
Ambition, when the pinnacle is gained
With many a toilsome step, the power is sought
Wants to support itself, & sighs to find
The envied height but aggravates the fall
George Bally
Maltese Falcon
Long the night, boisterous is the sea-shore;
Usual a tumult in a congregation;
The vicious will not agree with the good
Lywarch Hen
From nettle-danger flowers safely drawn,
With Monty on the roads to Tripoli
The Maltese felt them less & less alone
As day-by-day was nearing victory;
Valiant light
Brave Malta saved the world
When Hitler’s evil might was at Valetta hurl’d.
That once more yearn’d their homes to raze,
In an action of sheer spite
The heavens, for eleven days,
Full of sound & fire-sprite,
When spitfire its design displays
Lord of the azure height,
So many Axis pilots by them slain,
They never would return in force again.
With winter comes increas’d rations,
& mail from overseas,
Latest fashions, famous passions
Sets people at their ease,
Small semblance of normality & sweet-fill’d christmas trees.
Malta
December 25th
1942
Nippon Noon
into plain rubbish
they begin to turn –
fallen blossoms
Tsuji Momoko
Sanguine waters surround the Solomons,
The Sun of Empire starts her long descent,
Humbl’d & hurt by brash Americans,
Epitomised by one hardy sergeant;
Our big, bald Al,
As rough as gruff could be,
Stuck on Guadalcanal from Hicksville, Tennessee.
He watch’d the vaulting Perseids
Cause foeman’s vapouressence,
At times was forced to close his lids
To starbrite phosphorescence,
Struck by th’enchaunting Leonids
& life’s impermanence,
He remember’d what his Pa used to say,
“Son, life’s a loan, you’ll pay the debt one day.”
The Yankee seizes seas & skies
As the Imperatour,
Enlowers eyes, slouches & sighs,
“The army may withdraw…”
Bows Tojo, “Yes, your majesty…” then scuttles thro’ the door.
Tokyo
December 31st
1942
Imperial Dementia
An early death was considered likely
with an emperor so hard, so severe
in matters of belief
Jan Wagner
The pursuit of unbridl’d ambition,
Wildly bezerking thro’ civilised lands,
Oft leads to phantasies, as the vision
Of Empire crumbles to glitter-bone sands;
Hitler muses
Midst these mythopoeics,
So serenely ponders, “O, what should I do next?”
Another Christmas passes by
Still elusive, victory,
Cheer found but when his childish eye
Casts oer a model city,
By marble fire-place a sigh
Of wistful self pity…
Reliev’d by smashing up plastic soldiers
With models of rockets & jet fighters.
Retiring to his simple bed,
Old nightmares draw yet near,
Convulsions shred the shrieking dread,
Awake… awash with fear,
Blue lips babbling strange nonsense, gasping, “He… He… He’s been here!”
The Berghof
January
1943
Intrepedities
Though you may out of sight retire,
Malice will not be cheated so,
She can pursue where’er you go
Brooke Boothby
Captain Baron Jean-Michael de Selys
Saddl’d his typhoon without permission,
Whistling La Brabanconne askim the sea
Spire-tip Brussels swimming into vision;
Neath rooftop guns
Gestapo Headquarters!
Who murders Belgium’s sons, that rapes Belgium’s daughters.
At window-level whizz’d the plane
& pepper’d the place entire
With vengeful bullets, to sustain
Bodies tumbling under fire
With bursted abdomen & brain;
Watch the lone wolf flyer
Go treetop-touching down the Avenue,
To soar off high & melt in blue sky true!
Thro’ bodies, broken glass & blood
Rush stretchers & white sheets,
A crimson flood, a small crowd stood
Onwatching from the streets,
Stonefaced & silent, but inside singing from the songsheets.
Brussels
January 20th
1943
Zionism
See how villains make such noise
They turn birth & death into rituals
Fools fall prey to their shouts
Bullhe Shah
Too many massacres, dire & sneaky,
To mention in stanzettas – I’ll sing one,
Of how the Turks reduc’d Saloniki
From centuries of cultural Hebron:
The Holocaust
Accelerates the need
For better homelands, hors’d by Zion’s tawny steed
Rabbi Schonfeld supplies the plan
To save the Jewish fishes
Leave Hitler to his master plan
Un-netted in Mauritius
Tho’ parliament & churchmen fan
Flames of his best wishes
Such noble dream to save the Jews stillborn
When underneath the brier’s leaf, the thorn!
Yes, there shall be an Israel,
Her children are divine,
Like Azrael (prophet or asngel) the lobbies yell
“It must be Palestine,
Those lands promis’d to Moses on Mount Sinai, by sign.”
London
January
1943
Convoy
There is a silence where hath been no sound,
There is a silence where no sound may be, –
In the cold grave, under the deep, deep sea
Thomas Hood
America! Republic Young & Free!
Your Liberty remains supreme touchstone,
Keep safe thine arsenal of democracy
Til by great fleets to battle’s field is borne;
Your shore recedes,
Soon lost in hoary mists,
Merseywise flow the needs to feed th’Allied int’rests.
Our fleet in constant motion ploughs
Thro’ a ceaseless sea of silk,
The ocean crashes oer the boughs
Of Elizabeth & her ilk,
Gigantic herd of scatter’d cows
Laden with vital milk,
On all sides nothing but the tawny blue,
Sometimes an iceberg lumbers into view…
Jack blew into his freezing hands,
Inert, unthawable,
In vigil stands watching Iceland’s
Cliff rows formidable,
By nature’s beauty nobly touch’d… rip-tiding to battle.
The Atlantic Ocean
January
1943
Ghetto
on a morning of frost
in the soreness of waking
the cry of humanity goes out of itself
Lance Henson
Clack-dish echoes thro’ miserable streets,
But nobody has anything to give,
Death & disease with malnutrition meets
Where only HOPE whispers the will to live;
God’s earthly flail
Flung flat across Warsaw,
Grand flagellant unveils his ghoulish threshing floor.
Faith uplifted with the Torah
& the flesh of Hebrewdom,
Moses lights up the Menorah
Kinsfolk hand-held as they hum,
Proclaiming ‘Happy Hanukah’
& as the meal was done
Ludwig told stories of the Maccabees…
In bursts a breathless Karl with, “Father please
May we converse?” they left the room,
“I harbour gloomy news,
They wish our doom, up chimney flume
Intend to send the Jews,”
“This is not true…” “It is, but if they come we must refuse!”
Warsaw
January
1943
Avatars
Three hosts combine to offer sacrifice;
Three tongues prefer strange orisons on high;
Three gaudy standards flout the pale blue skies
Lord Byron
An old man drags his bulk across the sands,
Off-breaks beside the barb’d perimeter,
& clambors over, sharp wires dig in hands,
At once he’s accosted by a soldier;
“Hold it right there…
O my god, you’re Churchill!”
The P.M. gave his stare, the M.P. freezes still.
By Rooseveldt he takes his seat,
Discussive for the future,
“To German cities we must mete
The full wrath of the bomber!”
“Aye, until Germany’s defeat
& total surrender,
By Europe’s freedom all deeds must measure –
Japan may be destroy’d at our leisure.”
They left the villa for the sun,
Found soldiers to review,
Nigh ev’ryone American,
The fighters Yankee too,
That oerhead roar’d, defenders of the world’s most crucial two.
Casablanca
January 27th
1943
War at Sea
The sea shall seethe like boiling casserole,
Change colors, taking on unnatural form,
Showing its ill will at full blast to all
Ausiàs March
“Up periscope!” unveils a killing ground
By Seawolves circl’d in their hungry packs,
The feast is set, curl’d smoke plumes all around,
The silence broken, ev’rywhence attacks!
Cold & enpearl’d
The submariner rides,
Bellum Navale swirl’d beneath the whirling tides.
With heavy beard & nerves half shot
Xaver cursed his dank abode,
Often times his stomach would knot
As the depth charges explode
But when a new course would he plot
& the foe torpedoed
He felt his place with the warring nations…
Claxons caterwaul … to action stations!
Th’Elizabeth sinks! Jack Sumner’s
Clothes sea-salt saturates,
Haul’d by shoulders, joins the others,
Last lot of his shipmates,
Cramm’d in a bulging, wooden boat to contemplate their fates.
The Atlantic Ocean
February 1st
1943
(AA) Canto 39: Tornado
**************************************
Riding swiftly, Minaya Alvar Fanez kill’d thirty-four Moors with his sharp sword; his arm was stain’d with the blood dripping down to his elbow
The Poem of ‘The Cid’
Colonel Wingate
The temples are no protection:
the hunters are lying in wait
with traps & nooses & nets
Aristophanes
Burma… fresh bane of the British army,
Catalogue of defeat & disaster,
Receives a maverick visionary,
Determin’d to restore his land’s honour;
Daring designs
Regaled with sure surmise,
“Let me break thro’ the lines, harassing their supplies…”
He enlisted common scousers,
La, full of life & gobby,
Alchemied with Nepal’s Ghurkas
Busk’d in a dusky khaki,
He put them thro’ strictest paces,
Three months purgatory…
Gen’ral Wavell visits one stormy day,
Inspects them then salutes them on their way.
The vanguard of the re-conquest
Fords the Chindwin river,
Chain’d to the best, by good lord bless’d,
Sporting an umbrella,
“You never know when needed when tropical the weather!”
The Raj
February
1943
Pendulum Turns
And there before the night, he was aware
of the flayed fields of home, & black with ruin
The helpful earth under the tracks of tanks
Sidney Keyes
From the depths of a tractor factory
Rose a crackling corp’ral’s rattling broadcast,
Reaching within each German eaterie,
“Der Fatherland, der Fuhrer to the last!”
Lost & alone,
“Why are we forsaken?”
All animals hath flown, endure here only men.
Ivan came in ev’rywhereness,
“Hund wollt ihr ewig leben?”
In kingly, heroistic dress
Willie urges on his men,
Thro’ daunting danger & duress
Til all quell’d well, & then
He sits with his wife’s photo one last time,
Last round blows out his brains, walls coat with slime.
Paulus grappl’d with cruel conscience,
Cow’ring in the corner,
Christian sense curtails defence,
Consenting surrender,
How glad that captured mass of men meant for Siberia.
Stalingrad
February 2nd
1943
Death of Jack Sumner
The rage of armies is a shame of boys;
A hero’s panic or a coward’s whim
Is triggered by nerve or nervousness
Louis Simpson
They rais’d their spirits with an old sing-song,
Soon silenced by surfacing submarine,
At once old sailors knew something was wrong,
Those long, square-jaw’d faces far too serene;
Cold reasoning,
Der Fuhrer’s directive,
“Pity is burdening, let no opponent live.”
Sighting muzzles upon them aimed
Fuel enough for frighten’d flap,
“We are unarm’d, ye not ashamed!?”
Blonde rating straighten’d his cap,
Took four bullets, bloody & maim’d,
Croak’d, “Cheerio old chap!”
To this miraculously unhurt Jack,
Led breathless, daring not to answer back…
As Xaver survey’d the murder
He caught a faint movement…
As a Stemmler slays a Sumner,
Now unambivalent,
The goddess KARMA flit the scene & to another went.
Atlantic Ocean
February 3rd
1943
Death of Xaver Stemmler
Between the gem-hung velvet of the waves,
Our sires & grandsires in their green flesh start,
Bend skinny elbows, warn: “We have no graves…
Roy Fuller
E’er since the battle of Trafalgar Bay,
Those vigilant, oak-hull’d leviathans
Have held the Oceans in an Island’s sway,
“England expects!” ev’ry battle stations;
Night turns to day,
Depth-charge splash each quarter,
The decks awash with spray as under the water
Wee submarines are toss’d about,
BOOM-BOOM-BOOOOM & BOOM again,
Some sub-aquatic boxing bout…
Like fountains in a garden
Seawater spouts fill with grave doubt
Entrapp’d & frighten’d men…
Men coat their trousers in a cruddy goo,
As ships ripp’d up & simply flipp’d in two.
Almighty Ocean rushes in,
Thetis astride the bull,
Cat’clysmic din, Xaver aspin,
What weight crushes his skull,
To sleep the deep forever in the cold crypt of that hull.
The Atlantic Ocean
February
1943
Scented Roses
But the sunshine aye shall light the sky,
As round & round we run;
And the truth shall ever come uppermost
Charles Mackay
Plunge German spirits by Stalingrad’s wall,
Male students branded ‘coward dogs askulk,’
The White Rose blooms once more its glinted call,
Printing its stand against the heathen hulk;
‘Our dead adjured!
Kommilitoninnen!
We Deutsche have ne’er endured such tyrannies & sin!’
Willi Graf splashes graffiti,
Painting tin stencil slogans
All round the university –
Where its students versus shoguns
As thro’ each corridor empty
Trail the leaflet weapons
Of true friends of wisdom, lovers of truth,
Under a deadly, mad dog’s rabid tooth.
Sophie has join’d the Rose with pride,
To break the Nazi thrall,
Push’d oer the side a leaflet tide,
Like snowflakes soft they fall…
Between the gaps he saw her face, that man against the wall.
Munich University
February 18th
1943
Penalty Shoot-Out
It wasn’t history but memory
the day the township’s warriors stood
on the banks of the glen river
Aonghas Macneil
Partisans attack the camp at Siretz;
To avenge this impertinent action
Make answers for their grotesque karmic debts,
Every third prisoner faces the gun;
When name-by-name
Brave men of FC Start,
Have play’d their final game, plonk’d three persons apart.
Kuzmenko is the first to cry
Bull-clubb’d to the ground & shot,
Around Klimenko nail-fists fly,
By bulletstorm let to rot,
Shouting, “Red sport will never die!”
Trusevich marks his spot,
Stood proud & tall in a goalkeeper green,
Soon blood-stain’d in the Babi-Yar ravine.
The news filter’d back to the street,
Dishearten’d Konstantin,
Sick with defeat he went to meet
His mother in an inn,
“Worry not,” Christina whispers, “The final we shall win.”
Kiev
February
1943
Black Roses
My day is dune; & richt or wrang
The thocht comes like a waefu’ sang;
This Book & me we’ve travel’d lang
Hamish Hendry
As February sun deludes with Spring,
The pin-precise Gestapo get to work,
Grim narcomaniacs of torturing,
Brains mythomaniacally bezerk;
The ‘People’s Court,’
Judge Friesler at his head,
A traitor’s fate has sought, this day shall strike them dead.
As to the jackals they were toss’d,
For ‘sabotage’ & ‘treason,’
They form’d a holy pentecost
To interrupt with reason,
“You know as we the war is lost,
Cowards are in season!”
“Enough!” scoff’d Friesler, venemous & vex’d,
“I’ve found them guilty, guillotine their necks!”
This winter’s sunset is their last,
& this their final night
On Earth upcast, strength unsurpass’d,
Es lebe die frieheit,
For knowing freedom fought for sheds eternity’s delight.
Stadelheim Prison
February 22nd
1943
Russia Rises
For right is right, since God is God,
And right the day must win;
To doubt would be disloyalty
F.W. Faber
The pendulum commences western swing
The Wehrmacht thro’ thinwaist-high, wet snows wade,
The stench of death & swamp-thaw commingling
& Ivan seeming less of them afraid;
Their horses blown,
The battle-charge all spent,
A bitter spite is shown by every regiment.
As Buscher reaches Nastenka
As one the peasantry freeze,
Spying lovely Anastasia,
“Bring her here!” she turns & flees,
Soon captured by swift stormtrooper,
Soon naked on her knees,
She shivers as she’s dows’d in parrafin –
A match, a scream, hot hellfire strips her skin.
The thousand-year Reich in Russia
By the moment is reduced,
Each swastika, with hot anger,
Is ripp’d down from its roost,
As everywhere the liberated Stalin’s armies boost.
Mishinka
March
1943
Death of Franz Grunfeld
Surely the past from which the letters rise
Is waiting in the future, past the graves?
The soldiers are all haunted by their lives
Randall Jarrell
Years-on-years of uncheck’d persecution,
A brave few – finally – have lit the fuse,
Grenades & guns quite smartly smuggl’d in,
For this uncork’d uprising of the Jews;
The bullets fly
Into the German grey,
Better to fight & die than wait your murder-day.
Karl & his cousin, side-by-side,
Sense David interstellar,
When Philistine Goliath died
Beside the vale of Elah,
But SS swarming every side
Rat-trapp’d in a cellar,
Them Judah lions roaring in a cage,
Til flamethrowers incinerate their rage.
Above them, thro’ the smoky grates,
Gaurds resume their stations,
Thro’ hostile gates accelerates
Daily deportations,
As if lived Nebuchadnezzar thro’ these new migrations.
Warsaw
March
1943
(AA) Canto 40: The New World
**************************************
We are all under the same sky but we don’t all have the same horizon
Konrad Adenauer
Genesis
Overhead the seasons rock
They are paper bells
Calling to nothing living
W. S. Merwin
Before they taste the worst of wasted lives
Whom others breath deny by martial deed,
Before the flailing alien arrives
On Earth alight that bruis’d, enthirsted steed,
Before an age
Was vitrified in gore,
Let us devise the stage & lay its playful floor.
From stardust is a planet made
Then leave the rest to science,
Eftsoons we’ll hear the rise & fade
Of songbirds in alliance,
A never-ceasing serenade
Most happy circumstance
Of swallows following Dawn’s constant roll
Aslant a planet spinning pole-to-pole.
Thro’ lightning flash, hail-stones of coal,
Destruction decollates,
Those mires that maul, those fires that fall,
All breathing devastates,
While dregs of flesh existence call hopelessly to their mates.
Mexico
65,000,000 B.C.
Helen of Troy
And in the visions of romantic youth,
What years of endless bliss are yet to flow!
But, mortal pleasure, what art thou in truth!
Thomas Campbell
Not setting sun, not rosy-finger’d dawn,
Nor ocean’s pearl; not breezy mountain air,
Not spider-spun, nor lazy summer lawn,
Could e’er to this temptressy smile compare;
Her wide-sought hand
Won by the Spartan king,
Many a Grecian band gifts to their wedding bring.
From vinegar festivities
Paris woo’d her to one side,
Venus entwining destinies
As this hot, bedswerving bride
Sings lush, erotic melodies,
& sucks his love inside –
Afterwards, englamour’d with enchantment,
Thro’ spacious halls their silent footsteps went.
Moonsphere makes webbings in the waves,
Men row a ship to sea –
As future craves the golden graves
Of immortality,
These sweethearts, silken-sheeted, milk the teats of exstasi.
Aegean Sea
Birth of Gesu
In patience, then, possess thy soul,
Stand still! – for while the thunders roll,
Thy saviour sees thee through the gloom
William Allen
Rays of pure stardust pulse across the Earth,
According to some alien design,
For deity desires a humble birth
When interplanetary spheres align,
The Starchild born,
Warm & mellow manger,
His writ the world to warn of the Devil’s danger.
The virgin mother sent her child
To a cult of strict Essene,
With them the Dead Sea scrolls were filed,
Ancyent prophecies to glean,
With them this little lad was styled
Until he turn’d thirteen,
When Mary’s boy restor’d to Nazereth,
Naught but hell-burning brains & wafts of death.
Like sharp, shark fins the sins of Man
Round the incarnate swirl’d,
As Romans ran their sordid plan,
Thro’ war-polluted world –
Boy tutor’d in messiahdom, or Heaven’s face unfurl’d?
Judea
2 A.D.
Carolingia
The birth canal is yours
Either to open or to close.
Open it you must, dear elders
Hermana Ramarui
His armies birds in sky & trees on earth,
On Christmas Day was crown’d great Charlemagne;
King-conqueror, far from his cradle-birth,
He rais’d a triumph from a Caesar’s train;
Holy empire
On pagan planet won,
Whose perfect seed shall sire a spotless, proud-heart spotless son.
This pious Louis took a wife,
All the Angels deem’d her good,
These conjuring more regal life
Protected the sacred blood,
Each wise as Rome, each fair as Fife,
Each strong as Flemish wood,
Each gather’d by their father’s dying bed –
He drew them close & choking phlegma said,
“None of ye shall be Emporer,
But each a realm shall reign;
Italia, Germania,
The Franks & Aquitaine…”
Friction on such division stood, fought out on blood-fraught plain.
Aachen
843
Alfred
It may be glorious to write
Thoughts that shall glad the two or three
High souls, like those far stars that come to sight
James Russel Lowell
Only the lords of Wessex dare defy
The victual flamboyance of the Vikings,
“Are we not Saxons?” rings a captain’s cry,
The morning chorus of the English kings;
As great a man
As ever was Pompey,
Driving his battle-plan along the old Ridgeway.
They met the Norsemen on the hill
Life’s liberties to defend,
In moments making time stand still,
Immortalities suspend –
Britain some Nordic overspill
Or war-heroic blend?
As Saxons tough the better of the fight
Ravens of breaking cloth are put to flight.
Upsrpings a worthy capital
Laws writ in native tongue,
The chronicle of his struggle
Preserv’d in prose & song,
Then marries into Mercia to make his nation strong.
Winchester
892
Holy Roman Empire
While Rome could none esteem
But virtue’s patriot theme
You loved her hills, & led her laureat band
William Collins
Distant princes court Alfred’s grand-daughters,
Enchaunted by their dancing beauty’s youth;
Perfect as pearl, skin soft as spring-waters,
Souls hankering for virtue-verdur’d truth;
King Otho’s bride,
Edgitha, shares his reign,
Her Saxon blood allied with sacred Charlemagne.
“How yearnst I,” sighs the emperor,
“To unite all Germany,
Bind beautiful Bavaria
To blueberry Lombardy,
Blend heather-scented Swabia
With sunny Saxony –
Administ’ring, with Papal proconsent,
The central portions of this continent.”
Arose a sense of nationhood
Tied by Teutonic tongue,
In hall & wood, great tayles of blood,
The Niebelungen song,
Stirr’d up a spirit where the soul of Seigfried soar’d among.
Germania
962
Rise of Paris
The city’s all a-shining
Beneath a fickle sun,
A gay young wind’s a-blowing
Sara Teasdale
Long since the notion struck the Parisii
To settle by the Seine, & since sublime
Lutetia prais’d each Ceasar’s victory,
This eagle’s nest, amidst the mists of time,
Claims Frankish throne,
As jangling jongleurs sing,
“One of our very own has been elected king!“
How many noble knights advance
Gorgeous daughters for the bride
Of Hugh Capet, the first in France,
Whose Parisians beam pride,
But only one lass stands a chance,
As once again allied,
The blood of Charlemagne & Alfred merge,
One wedding night, abed, with mighty splurge.
“So this is life!” the pilgrim said,
Upon the paths to Spain,
To slowly tread, with fruit & bread,
The roads thro’ Aquitaine
Meeting, en route, the valorous, the vocal & the vain.
France
990
New Spain
But just before the end
there is always this crepuscular hailstorm
echoing base voice owned by men
Elvis Gbanabom Hallowell
Not knowing world empire was theirs’ to sire
Fair Isobel’s promis’d to Fernando,
With passion elevating cannonfire,
Grenada falls beneath their combin’d blow;
United land
Centred upon Castille,
Chief of the bible brand with homicidal zeal.
From Genoa Columbus came,
Whose fleet from Cadiz set sail,
The lure of spice, the lust for fame,
Thro’ bold missions would prevail,
Each sunset ‘rison flash’d aflame,
Or brooded on a gale,
‘Til verging on a murd’rous mutiny
Thin verdant sliver parted sky & sea.
“I claim this place for regal Spain,”
Flag thrusteth into rocks,
“This pleasant rain must grow our grain
& feed our teeming flocks,”
On board, a sickly sailor’s breathing death-streams of smallpox.
America
1492
Motecuhzoma
In the beholding eye,
A thousand years of wind
Are cool
Shiki
There was a time when white men thought them best,
Of course we know this naught but braggart’s boast,
But then, there was a time when to the West
Great floating mountains landed off the coast;
“Quetzalcoatl
Has come!” the Emperor,
Faced with true immortal, tribulates in terror.
Hernando Cortez was no god,
Gunpowder was his magic,
Him over honor rode slip-shod,
Intransigencies tragic,
Snapping Motecuhzoma’s rod,
Sends tumbling, double-quick,
A vast empire of gleaming golden plate,
Consumed entire into the Spanish state.
Five hundred years, from pole-to-pole,
European empires
Shall each, & all, rise up, then fall,
Until the thought retires
That men aren’t meant to others rule… Cortez inspects the pyres.
Tenochtitlan
1521
Mumble Words 