(AA) Canto 4: Fascist Dawn
Nuclear Pretensions
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
Pools of academic alligators
Are jewels in the muddy earth of us,
Repudiating repudiators
With gliding minds, perfectly merciless;
What feats of brains
Did beastlike congregate
About the crystal chains, to conquer & create.
Now branded ‘Oppy’, broomstick thin,
A dashing, tall chain-smoker,
Who wanted everything to win
From bursaries to poker,
& after dark, cigars & gin,
Just a Joe Bloggs joker –
But all the time, relentless, without pause,
His brain was calculating Newton’s laws.
He chew’d, with Otto Hahn, the cud,
Cueing up the Meson,
The whole world could be won if would
Be conjur’d, with right reason,
Dropping bombs atomical the next time war’s in season.
Gottingen
1927
First Waves
My heart is drowning in love for you
I am so proud of you
I pledge my life to you
Sayed Khalifa
Little white cloud-flake breaks a blue spring sky,
While below, in the glittering city,
Sit avant garde sipping martini dry,
The men looking good, the women pretty;
Beneath that cloud
Defeat did, drifting, fade;
The people laughing loud at this strange street parade.
Men joining hands, chests out-puffing,
Herr Hitler & disciples;
Hawk-ey’d Hess, gorbellied Goering,
Club-footed, dwarfish Goebells,
Himmler completes the inner-ring,
Lord of the Schutzstaffels;
Defended by the brown-shirted SA,
Sensing their time will come… but not this day…
That will end in disappointment –
Like condescending water,
The party sent just three percent
From the common voter –
Who on earth would ever let a Nazi date his daughter!?
Berlin
May
1928
Dionysia
Ladies & young men in love,
Long live Bacchus & long live Love!
Let every one make music, dance, & sing
Lorenzo De’ Medici
Excess in Weimar’s capital prevails!
This eldorado of exquisite chic
Cocaine contains – characters & cocktails!
Round Adlon’s rooms swan-headed trollies creak,
Where julep mint
& complex oyster dish
Spice every ducal stint with a royal relish.
From cocktails at the Jockey Club,
They flooded to the negro bars
The jumbl’d, thumping, huddl’d hub
Where saxophones & guitars
Muffl’d the bass’s double dub
Where decadents from Mars
Surround the Carolina cryin’ queen,
Freaks cheek-to-cheek her plaintive wails did preen.
In saunter’d Roehm, a transvestite
Busty, in bright blonde wig,
& gave a light to some young sprite
Naked but for a fig
& took him to a secret room, men grunting like a pig!
Berlin
July
1929
Wall Street Crash
Tents of winds are my home
And stones are my furniture
The cycle of my days is one of curses and misery
Mustafa Seed Ahmed
Young land of a liquor-laced razzmatazz,
Grown richer from the Big War’s victory,
Home to the silver screen & jive-cat jazz,
Flag-waving for global prosperity;
Along Wall Street
Ford motorcades whizz by,
Whole Princeton, Yale compete for share-blocks rising high…
Whose dreams, in one black instant fell,
Auguring the global doom,
Strain’d faces yelling, “Sell! Sell! Sell!”
Burst the pink bubblegum boom,
‘Twas like some scene from Dante’s Hell
As chaos gript the room,
& thro it all one sharp sound to derange –
The staccato click of the Stock Exchange.
“All dem good times dey be over,”
Serfs cry from shore to shore,
How ruthless the great leveller,
Rich stoopeth with the Poor,
A wicked vortex currencies upsucking by the score.
New York
October 28th
1929
Nazi Fires
If I were fire, I would set the world aflame;
If I were wind, I would storm it;
If I were water, I would drown it
Cecco Angiolieri
The mountains seem’d in song, as fell the snow
On Oberstdorf; whose timber rooves did seem,
To all who gaz’d upon the streets below,
A darling face in a sensual dream;
Herr Dietrich lit
Saltpetre cigarette,
Continuing to sit, a hunter with a net.
The townsfolk all surpris’d to see
First physical swastika
On Dietrich’s arm, show sympathy
When, bullish as Boudicca,
He spews, “this world catastrophe
Jews of America
Have conjur’d – a dystopian nightmare,
With vermin infiltrating everywhere!”
With set of sun he rode the slopes
Up in a cable car,
By torchlight gropes around laid ropes
All smear’d with pitch & tar,
To light bewitching swastika – that flaming, far-seen star.
The Nebelhorn
November
1929
Der Fuhrer
Magnanimous Despair alone
Could show me so divine a thing
Where feeble hope could never have flown
Annamacharya
Max Stemmler took Kreuzberg’s mendicant streets,
Epiloguizing dejected fortune,
Each crashing bank long labour’s theft repeats,
Made money might as well be on the moon;
One grey stone wall
New poster burning bright,
Piercing his solemn soul as if ’twere holy light.
Max bought the party newspaper,
Absorb’d it over coffee,
The Voelkischer Beobachter,
Giddying philosophy,
Promises of doing better,
See… today… a rally!
He asks for the bill, “Danke, that was nice.”
“Since you’ve come in coffee doubl’d in price!”
A new Crusade to test the Jews,
None knows just what it is,
Pairs of worn shoes torn into twos,
Scuddle home in phrenzies,
Flogging that dogged gospel to bedraggl’d families.
Berlin
1930
Businessmen
Yea, the coneys are scared by the thud of hoofs,
And their white scuts flash at their vanishing heels,
And swallows abandon the hamlet-roofs.
Thomas Hardy
From Immenstadt & Kempton went the boys
So proud storm-troops to be for the SA,
A clank of jackboots, rhetoric & noise,
& over-barging all fools in their way;
Threw crude Jew jibes
At holidaymakers,
As when astonish’d tribesmen first view’d the Quakers.
Hoteliers from round the town
Congather’d, handshakes, all smiling,
‘Til with a stern, mood-slicing frown,
“Those bastards unbeguiling
That prance about in shirts of brown,
Paradise defiling,
Are scaring off our customers, you know,
I mean… Ringelmann, he is a maestro!”
“Judge Neuberger, a whole floor takes
All summer – each carafe
With wine & steaks adds up, & makes
Good wages for my staff –
The Jews are good for business – while the Nazis just make me laugh!
Oberstdorf
1930
Festival of Rice
He was adorned in his very best,
he was oiled like a king,
with beads of silver in his hair
Ama Ata Aidoo
As Basho join’d the chanting how he cuts
A handsome figure in those robes of gold,
Among the drummers round the paddy huts
With Kagarume dancers, young & old;
As wood blocks flail
To clank of bamboo rods,
The Sumiyoshi hail the Shinto harvest gods.
With dip & swirl the girls releas’d
The whirl of a spinning top,
The fields are bless’d as begs a priest
The boon of a fruitful crop,
then villagers all flock to feast
& drank dry every drop,
As did ancestors centuries ago
Intently sentimental went Basho
& toasted all the emperors
“Their names grow with the trees,
Who fend for us, descend for us
On Heaven’s splendid breeze –
To these I am devoted, & to all we Japanese.”
Kansai
June 14th
1930
Mumble Words 