The unknown weapon is radiant lightning, a devastating messenger of death, which turn’d all to members of Vrishni & Andhaka clans to ashes. Their whiten’d bodies became unrecognizable. Those who escaped lost their hiar & nails – as if eaten by insects. In a very short time food became poisonous.
The Mahabharata
Okinawa
Take you the folk of the Earth in pay,
With bars of gold your ramparts lay,
Bedeck the ocean with bow on bow
Ernst Lissauer
The greatest armada in history,
Far from Hawaii’s indecorous day,
Tho’ besieged by swarms of Kamakaze
Deem’d nothing but the, ‘Fleet That Came To Stay;’
Each fit GI
Surged forth victorious,
All-times supported by his forty carriers.
More like chivalric pilgrimage,
Meters recrudescent miles,
Foxholes, fatigue & foliage,
Rallentandoid lizard isles,
From anguine path to rocky ridge
Defenders heap’d in piles,
More snipers fanatical tied up trees,
Sending advancing Yankees to their knees.
Within his divine death-place sat
An angel from the sky,
Some vampyre bat… the ship-deck spat,
But fail’d to swat that fly,
Breaking, exploding bestial to high-pitch howl’d “Banzai!”
Sea of Japan
May
1945
Death of a Reichsfuhrer
evil:
by me & to me –
squelches inside me
John Rodker
This scrawny, short, Schutzstaffel Mongoloid,
High priest of Aryan supremacy,
Shaves moustache smooth in order to avoid
The scales of denazied authority;
Tho’ unsuspect –
Panic’d false papers thrust…
The photo records check’d, his eye-patch guise was crush’d.
“Are you Himmler?” he deft defies
Gentle interrogation,
When stripp’d & search’d, the doctor tries
A small dental inspection,
Dull glimmers prise the narrow eyes,
Beacons of decision…
Crushing a small capsule of cyanide,
This secret death namore his teeth shall hide.
The Fowler died & with him went
The sad wyghts of Wansee,
Whose wails had sent the innocent
Unto that twisted tree,
Where they would hang from countless nooses’ cruellest misery.
Lueneburg
May 25th
1945
Death of Basho
Burning my house to keep
them out, you sowed wind. Hear it blow!
Soon you reap
John Beecher
The messenger sprinted across the sand,
Baring the loss of the Yamamoto,
Before the noble lord of his command…
As Basho’s senses stirr’d by Bushido;
Unsheathing blade,
Taut fingers grip’s shark skin,
No longer, now, afraid… he drew his charges in.
Cheeks grubby rubb’d rouge-powder red,
Reflected the bloody glow,
Flaring upon each soldier’s head
When sever’d from it’s torso…
Surrounded by his loyal dead
It was his turn to go –
Smiling the gravest grimace, Seppuku,
Across his side his father’s sword slow drew.
Dragonfly thron’d on lotus claw,
Sitting by bonsai tree,
Intestines pour, white waves of gore,
Honour’d Hari Kari!
Escorts the soul thro’ mystic realms of encloak’d in chivalrie.
Mount Shuri
June 21st
1945
Back to the Hustings
Soft peace she brings; wherever she arrives
She builds our quiet as she forms our lives ;
Lays the rough paths of peevish Nature even
Matthew Prior
About boroughs of a bankrupt Britain –
Her empire pawn’d to elongate the war –
Old Churchill drives, searching re-election,
Aching to be sent back thro’ Downing’s door;
From death & strife
Rises some new spirit,
Tho’ seeking better life their leader’s words still bit;
“I lay down here that solemn charge
Placed upon me in dark times,
When we held off Hitler’s barrage,
Then sought justice for his crimes,
As peaceful futures loom up large,
& sweeter shine all climes,
“Vote for me…” answers fill the ballot box –
A welfare state by Britain’s quayside docks.
Invoted are change-hungry men,
Praise the Labour Party!
Out chimes Big Ben, from Number Ten
Travels Clerment Atlee,
Laird of his race, to take his place as one of the ‘Big Three.’
London
July 27th
1945
A New Bomb
Westward the course of empire takes its way ;
The four first acts already past,
A fifth shall close the drama with the day
Bishop Berkeley
Carefree strolling thro’ the Sans Soucci,
Poetgarden of the playboy Kaisers,
Relaxing by the royal Jungfernsee,
Stalin deeper strategies devises
For Molotov’s
Superb post-conflict plans;
Schloss Cecilienhoff’s grand gathering of clans
Conjoins occidental chieftans
Together, tongue-tied, in cheer,
Those truth-charged comments of Patton’s
Barge free about Truman’s ear;
“Why should we stop, when damn Russians
We could, too, also clear!”
The Allies seem distinctly divided,
Cautiously all converses conguided.
With Poland strangely ink-shaded,
A time for frankness come,
Truman traded glances, chaunt said,
“We have forgeth new bomb,
Intended to smite low Japan,” fresh devils beat the drum.
Potsdam
August 1st
1945
Royal Awakening
I wished to die last night. I wished to die.
But then I feared, for I was alone,
The darkness seem’d to me an ocean high
Inger Hagerup
Calls for unconditional surrender
Emanate from a stately Potsdam room,
Tojo pleads, “Terms too harsh, Lord Emperor…
The nations honour vital as her doom.”
Majestic, “No!”
Then Hirohito sigh’d,
“The time has come to grow, too many sons have died.”
While Tojo slid away to brood
At the Yasukini shrine,
The Emperor explor’d his mood
With a glass of Saki wine,
His vision ev’ry vista view’d
From Saipan to the Rhine;
Events & forces spiral from control,
A broken fortress at an empires fall.
He sent out deep meditations
Upon his fastest steeds,
“Fly, fly my sons, fly to Russians,
Fly to the Swiss, the Swedes,
Let peace rush round the world once more as water does the reeds!”
Tokyo
August 4th
1945
Nuclear Dawn
The bomb burts like a flower,
& grew upwards under the sun.
And men stood far off, & wondered.
Angela M Clifton
On flexing orthoptic Truman insists,
Despite Japan’s offers of perfect peace,
B29 whines thro’ dense morning mists,
A break in the clouds… the new bomb’s release;
Their mission done
Men turn & bank away,
Flash brighter than the sun washes th’Enola Gay.
Nippon’s fair skies were ripp’d apart
By an awesome sphere of fire,
Hotter than Sol’s star-boilant heart,
Birth of the new messiah,
No brush of Pre-Raphaelite art
Could paint this awful pyre,
As in horrific instant Balrog comes
Bestride ten raging trillion atoms.
Cometh the cloud of fungal shape,
No nat’ral law could halt
Its gruesome rape, a cityscape
Spectres of Hebrew salt,
Forms leprous, red-raw populace, or shadows in asphalt.
Hiroshima
August 6th
1945
Knockout Blow
O cry it across the chasm
Of ages, how we struck
In the atom’s smithy a sword
Stanley Snaith
The shockwaves of that terrible whirlwind
Tornadoes form, F5 morality,
But, come the dusts, Democracy hath pinn’d
His badges on the breasts of Liberty,
Close must the clash,
How can Japan fight on,
When in a single flash whole cityscapes are gone.
“This morning, sire, we were attack’d…”
“Which place?” “Hiroshima,
As of yet they’ve made no contact…”
Sadness fell’d the Emperor,
“How can this be, the city lack’d
For naught, I remember…”
Came later in the day the stunning truth,
When wept he for the old ones & the youth,
When holding head in trembling hands
He rued all he had done,
& understands the world demands
The setting of his sun,
“We must make peace, to Molotov release my decision.”
Tokyo
August 6th
1945
Extreme Force
Among some green or dried out leaves
there sings upon the window sill
a foreign bird
Astrid Cabral
“Things alter’d very much since Tsushima,”
Says Molotov to the ambassador,
“This morning we attack’d Manchuria,
& thus is our declaration of war!”
With this red wreath,
The Soviet Jackal
Sinks perdifious teeth in Japan’s carcass skull.
As soldier seizes higher ground
To win the battle below,
A pilot bristles over ground,
From the fuselage lets go
Another moment to astound,
A new Nagashino –
Now forms the mad noise of many waters,
Nuclear phrenzie swarms as she slaughters.
As Liberty’s long vision drew
Closer magnanimous,
With quick one-two victory flew
Yon that black wilderness,
Gaunt skeletons strewn thro’ the ash defines total success.
Nagasaki
August 9th
1945
Axis & Allies 