I have always loved history, particularly WWII. Ever since I was a schoolboy I have been fascinated by this period. The first piece of writing I ever did was transcribing an entry from the Encyclopedia Britannica about the battle of El-Alamein. I became fascinated with Rommel, and the Third Reich. I remember one day my father came home from work and I had pictures of Hitler, Goering and Himmler up over my bed, as other boys would have football stars. The youthful appeal of uniforms and violence. Oh, if I had of been alive at the time in Germany I would, no doubt, have become a member of the Hitler Youth. But, you grow up, thank God!
The following two poems were both published for the first time in Northern Ireland, the first Poem as King Tiger was published in A New Ulster, the editor there Amos Greig is also a big history buff. I had been reading a lot of Anthony Beevor and books about the Eastern Front. The battle of Kursk, for example, has often captured my imagination. Stalingrad too, of course. Beevor's account is simply wonderful. Epic history. But there are many compelling films to see on YouTube, as well. I love hearing the accounts of veterans, for example. I met one on my way home from France in 1995, it was the year after the 50th anniversary. He was a Canadian infantryman who had fought his way through Caen and up to Holland. You can only have respect for that generation, what they saw, what they lived through...
The second poem here, Prelude to Citadel was published in an anthology of poems to commemorate the holocaust. I deliberately sent them in a poem about Kursk. Not because I wanted to deny the relevance of what happened to the Jewish community in Europe, but to highlight other genocides which took place. As the war in the East was a war or genocide also, the figure of Russian dead dwarfs the figures of the Jewish holocaust. Not that it is a competition, but you simply want to remind people. The Nazis basically wanted to annihilate everyone who was not considered "Aryan".
There are, of course, a lot of references to all of this period of history with what is going on today. So called 'Strong' leaders, are back en vogue . Hence the post!
Poem
as King Tiger
The
joy of writing. The power of preserving. Revenge of a mortal hand.
Wislawa Szymborska
In order to withstand the fiction of eternity
The poem must be as resolute as the Final Solution.
It must be able to withstand the holocaust;
Stand up, like a flower of evil, to the most cynical
inspection.
If it speaks of love it must do so
With the velocity of an 88mm canon.
Its heart must be as stalwart as a Maybach engine.
Its skin as thick so as to be able to deflect all
armoured piercing.
The poet likened then to a Commander
Well versed in Clausewitz and The Nature of War,
Life being analogous with unending conflict.
Of course, choosing the right side to defend is key.
Images of all P
Crushing the barbed wire, annihilating the real enemy.
Prelude
to Citadel
Private
Joachim Kleist stood up in his brown,
Pebbled
leather jackboots, which had seen far
Better
days. They had survived two Russian
Winters,
but on looking at them in the
Summer
light, he feared that neither they
Nor
he could survive a third! It's true,
The
army was being re-equipped with the
New
Tiger tanks, more than a match for any Russian.
But,
they were all too few, and too late.
Hadn't
they already annihilated millions,
And
still they still kept coming... The hordes!
Uneasily,
he flung the cigarette
From
him down the sun burnt hill. It lay
Smoking
there were it had fallen. A sign of things to come.
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