Poem as King Tiger and Operation Citadel

                                 


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 Panzer turning their turrets and reversing on Auschwitz,

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.

 http://www.poetryni.com/poems-for-holocaust-memorial-day-2016.html