(AA) Canto 6: Swastikas
Omar Mukhtar
They are inevitably destroyed
Like plaster washed off in the rains
Like the sandy bank of a river
Lalitavistara
On Turkish carcass Italy doth gorge,
Only the true Senussi Rome withstood,
But tanks emitting from the Fiat forge
& gangs of fascists fill black pails with blood;
Closing a ring
Round Jebel Akhdar’s hills,
Where Muhktar’s rebel spring resistant moods instils.
As mustard gas, like falling snow,
Deals death & devastation
Il Duce on the radio
Thro’ camps of concentration,
the struggle crumbles blow-by-blow –
To ensure starvation,
At Egypt’s border wire divides the sand,
& every mosque as clos’d down out of hand.
At last the Desert Lion caught,
Treasonly convicted,
The noose grew taut, a life cut short,
Watchers on predicted
The Goddess KARMA could no let such acts go unafflicted.
Suluq
Libya
1932
A Sudden Engagement
A gentle wind fans the calm night:
A bright moon shines on the high tower.
A voice whispers, but no one answers when I call
Fu Hsuan
“Costanzo, Granduca di Livorno,
This nouveaux Fascistnoblesse has a son
Handsome enough, his name Galeazo…”
Whom Edda meets, tho’ neither is smitten
A film-date shar’d,
Topless girls pearl fishing
In Polynesia, staring silently, wishing
The bodyguards a row behind
Would vanish on their vespas,
This role she lived lived all undefin’d
Where suffocation prospers,
Her young man seems to read her mind,
Leans across & whispers,
“Do you want to marry me?” Edda smil’d
& said, “Why not?” – “My daughter, she is wild,”
Her mother said, “but one to tame,
A maschiaccio –
But, all the same, to her a game
This life – she shall not sew
Or cook – but be assur’d her love & loyalty will grow.”
Rome
January
1932
Deutschland Sings!
The two-voiced mouth of secrets shared,
We two make a single Sphinx.
The two arms of a single cross
Vyacheslav Ivanovich Ivanov
From boist’rous lieder of the Alpine south
To bawdy ballads of the Baltic ports,
Teutonic spirit, drawn first as a thought,
Emerges as music from every mouth;
Orchestras play
In Cafes, without pause,
The stage hits of the day to sing-a-long applause.
As over wooden balconies
The housemaid hangs a mattress,
She fills the air with melodies –
Clad in well-iron’d hiker’s dress
Stroll the strumming mandolinnys
Along lanes litterless
Thro’ the old walls to the forest hills,
While to those women at the window sills
The boatman from his flowing throne
Waggles happy fingers –
The scratchy drone of gramophone
Cast the meistersingers
Around the square ’til overwhelm’d by the handbell ringers.
Heidelberg
1932
Fascist Nuptials
We think we know ourselves, but all we know
Is: love surprises us. It’s like when sunlight flings
A sudden shaft that lights up glamorous the rain
Liz Lochhead
Explosions of fragrant fecundity
From azaleas, roses, gardens fill,
Spill’d from Torlonian villa, pretty
Edda look’d, like a tower on a hill,
Or Dante’s muse,
The wedding party march’d
To San Guiseppe’s pews thro’ gladiusi arch’d.
As Papal Nuncio demands
The day to be religious,
Ambassadors from many lands
& editors prestigious,
With uniforms, bejewell’d hands,
Diamonds, furs, prodigious;
Surround the darling dance of vows & rings,
That consummates recurring terms of kings.
Choir singing Romagnolan hymns,
The bride & gloom set free
To lock lithe limbs, their fiat skims
The vias speedily
To Hotel Quisisana on the island of Capri.
Rome
April 30th
1932
Albert Einstein
Prisoners of hope, arise,
& see your Lord appear !
Lo ! on the wings of love He flies
C Wesley
This crazy prophet, this quantum guru,
Destroys Man’s mute concepts of time & space,
Whose mind alert enough to feel the Jew
Must face the fury of the Master Race;
If in their hands,
They had the bomb as well,
The world shall understand naught but ‘Gott in Himmel!’
Heart-skipping to the mercedes,
Arm-hugging his Yankee guest,
Mouth-speaking amidst garden trees
Of the e’er enticing West,
When wistfully Albert agrees
To leave the nuptual nest…
“When?” he furrows his Newtonian brow,
Kisses his darling wife & whispers, “now!”
With liquid eyes & drought-dry throat
One most emotive day,
Thoughts all afloat he boards a boat
Bound for the USA,
Those realms of milk & honeydew, three thousand miles away.
Antwerp
November
1932
Yin & Yang
My strength is the strength
Of ten young things: I am with you:
In that first moment of delight
Roethke
Oer Berchtesgaden Ribbentrop arriv’d,
Found Hitler waiting at the Wachenfeld,
In whom the simplest of solutions thriv’d
Express’d in simplest terms – the two just gell’d –
The Nouveaux Riche,
The Circus of the Brawls,
Stitch’d in a sick pastiche – &, as evening falls,
It ends with an invitation,
“Do visit us in Dahlem…”
‘Twas a mental liberation
When he left the ‘Us’ for ‘Them’,
Cultivated conversation
Off-syphon’d caustic phlegm,
As Ribbentrop did ably demonstrate
The table manners of a man of state.
Ammelies was quite delighted
To meet her husband’s guest;
Who converted, nay, devoted,
Upon his wife impress’d
Herr Hitler was the antidote to Deutschland dispossess’d!
Berlin
1932
Breath of Evil
I chewed all my dreams
In the fragile bowls
Of our independences
Charles Ngande
Freya Von Moltke ador’d her husband
As Germany his famous ancestor,
A soul conceptually enlighten’d,
Quite unlike this fright’ning man before her;
Wild animals
Surround him in a pack,
As cinematix swells, breath burns into her back.
Beside a sibbilantine blaze
Stood the district magistrate,
Helmuth onlisten’d with amaze
“Leave the Nazis to their fate
Let inefficience stem their craze,”
Splurts Helmuth, “they’ll create
Dystopian catastrophes of doom!”
In burst his wife, like panic, to the room.
“I saw him in the cinema,”
“Saw whom?” “Herr Hitler!” “Him!”
“Our eyes did spar, his dreadful tar
Did coat unquiet, grim,
Dim orbs as dull as stormclouds after sunset on the rim.”
Berlin
January
1933
Chancellor Hitler
Opposite them a peculiar fight
enables the drinkers to lay aside
their comic books and watch with interest
Al Purdy
The old ones in the Reichstag share their fears,
Kabbalic nest of arch-intiguerie,
The Nazis know their day of glory nears,
But not quite yet, no clear majority;
Arms magnate meet,
“That man most warlike seems…”
“Aye, let us fund his feet, & permeate his dreams.”
Charming all the right-wing parties,
‘The front of the Harzburger,’
Plus money from the industries
& Mussolini’s lira,
All of Germany criss-crosses,
Rallying each burgher,
On every side the SA’s numbers swell,
‘Tis better than the jobless carousel.
Soon into power Hitler sworn,
His cause célèbre won,
Tho’ wintry morn chills to the bone,
He seems a shining sun,
Some prophet like Ezekiel, God with a gatling gun.
Berlin
January
1933
Unter Den Linten
The zealot’s flame deep in the hot brown eyes
That glowed with strange and holy whisperings,
And searched the stars, and caught angelic wings
Alan Sullivan
Hitler breakfasts by the Wilhemstrasse,
Freshly elected Chancellor to be,
When possessing Berlin controls Prussia,
& those controlling Prussia, Germany!
Beside the flag,
Luddendorf whispers, “This
Accursed man must drag us all down the abyss!“
Men drank until the sunset made
A berth for the Evening Star,
Forming a happy cavalcade
Beneath Brandenburger bar,
As if with Bismark to parade
The Kaiser’s spoils of war;
Into the city, under the lime trees,
Ribbons of torchflame flicker’d in the breeze.
“Seig heil! Seig heil! Seig heil! Seig heil!”
Der Fuhrer close to tears,
His stoneface veil torn by love’s gale,
Arms jerk up to the cheers,
“We must build up a Reichland to endure ten hundred years!”
Berlin
January
1933
Mumble Words 