War is little more than a catalogue of mistakes & misfortunes
Winston Churchill
Victorious Valetta
I cannot think this creature died
By storm or fish or sea-fowl harm’d
Walking the sea so heavily armed
Andrew Young
As back to Turkey gloom-cloak’d galleys glide
Let it forever cross the world be known
How one small island majesty defied,
Plucking charr’d feathers from the Peacock Throne;
How Christendom
Triumph’d over Crescent –
Europe’s every kingdom gold-gratitudes have sent.
Auberges of Auvergne & France,
Aragon & Germany,
Castille, Portugal & Provence,
Pour wealth into the kitty,
Fortune enough to help finance
A fortified city,
Forever joining with its founding father,
‘Humillima Civitas Valettae.‘
This was the Ottoman High Tide,
World conquest incomplete
Now Maltese pride with Rome allied,
The grand, Christian fleet
Slaughters the Turkish navy – irreversible defeat.
Lepanto
1571
Armada
Let the hen be clawed; let the lion roar;
Let the foolish be pugnacious;
Let the heart be broken with grief.
Llywarch Hen
English impressa dares the best of Spain,
Tho’ feeble-bodied Alfred carv’d her heart,
As Buccaneers ravage her golden Main,
Castille, to punish, plans this bold upstart –
Vainglorious,
Armies pois’d for battle,
Her fleet as numerous as th’Augean cattle.
Sea-fortresses threaten the shore,
’Twas national squeakybumtime,
Drake sent his navy out to war,
Soak’d in chivalry & rhyme,
Fierce as Erymanthean Boar,
Proud men in scurvy prime,
Shall pour hot blood out of a British sky
On men who went expecting not to die.
As day-by-day King Phillip’s fleet
Grew weary for the fight,
On came defeat, with backbone beat
& battle-plan contrite,
Spectres of splendid, gilded ships like crops which locusts blight.
Irish Sea
1588
Thistle & Rose
Is not Thy Forth, as well as Isis Thine?
Though Isis vaunt shee hath more Wealth in store,
Let it suffice Thy Forth doth love Thee more
William Drummond of Hawthornden
London laments the passing of an age,
The virgin Gloriana breathes her last,
As clannom-moulds of monarchs hold the stage
Proud Stuart bloodline pours into the cast;
Britain reborn,
One king, one law, one land!
The border guards withdrawn, the lords & ladies stand,
“Deirest bretherin & friendis
My two realmis I unite
To endis all oor quarellis,
Together wee must fyght
All oor rascally enemis,
Put them to common flyght,
Letting oor contree prosper with the peese,
& all oor revenues thereby increese.”
The world we live in day-by-day
Was born this very year,
This moulded clay, this keen swordplay,
This burgeoning idea,
That Britain is an entity, her destiny unclear.
London
1603
Pilgrim Fathers
Peach blossom that’s made thicker by the rain.
Deep in the trees, I sometimes see a deer,
And at the stream I hear no noonday bell
Li Bai
Far from the divine right of divers kings,
Mayflower unburthens the purer faiths,
Shores paradisean Polaris brings –
No longer men but ragged, pale-faced wraiths;
Indian chief
Welcomes his white guests in,
Advent of native grief, the sentence did begin.
In the land of the Sequana
& the endless prairie plain,
Where the buffalo & cougar
Suckle Susquehanna’s vein,
Horseback tribes have lived forever
Praising both sun & rain,
Content to roam upon ancestral soil –
Now aiding pilgrims in their meagre toil.
Seedling imperial takes root,
The plant begins to spread,
As shoot-by-shoot fresh towns recruit
Life to replace the dead,
Tough slaves are made to gather grain, rough soldiers guard the bread.
North Virginia
1628
Closing the Orient
I saw the follies of my former flame,
I turn’d indignant from the hateful sight,
Struck with remorse, and mortified with shame
HJ Pye
As families of monkeys hug the trees
Away from the rambunctious jungle floor,
As dragonflies hover on mountain breeze
Like albatrosses gathering offshore;
Tokugawa
Shuns the approaching West,
European power views more encroaching pest.
The Shogun’s temple throbb’d intense,
“Send them back across the seas,
About our harbours build a fence,
All their goods & assets seize,
& offer them no recompense,
Even the Portuguese,
No more their decadence must we endure,
Let us free Shinto from this stint impure.”
Imagine if the pedalo
Was thrown off Lake Nakki!
From Tokyo to Kyoto
Via Nagasaki,
Old ports are cleans’d of foreign trade, trinkets deem’d quite tacky.
Japan
1640
The Thirty Years War
Through a mist that makes five rivers one,
We bid each other a sad farewell,
We two officials going opposite ways
Wang Bo
As shepherds find pockets of anxious sheep
Pull from the flock, as Rajput palaces
Crumble with time, as when the pathway steep
Descends from pinnacles & promises;
Colossal Spain,
Catholic continent,
Lay challenged in her reign by northern protestant.
& so the great death-time begun
Spoken across gypsy palms,
These phrenzied wars of religion
Only spilling blood becalms,
Bouy’d up by Aztec bullion,
Germany up in arms –
As three hundred petty princes squabble
Handsome burghers turn’d to brick & rubble.
The treaty of Westphalia
Ends three decades of wars,
When Europa has together
Made conflict cause-by-cause,
When Prussian gentry muses, “This not peace, but more a pause.“
Berlin
1648
Nervous World
An old woman sat alone at the edge
of the market
a pitcher of water beside her
Ante Popovski
Masticating mellifluous parley,
Men praise war & its pale, auspicious strain,
Proving keystones of mortal history,
Even the New World forced to know its bane.
Setting the scene
For godless, global rage,
Deep things to be & been must pass upon this page.
The world has sewn its seeds of woe
In the fertile bed of time,
Every one a weeping willow
Every one commits a crime,
Ye free men of the future show
Thro’ prose or rosy rhyme,
How great world war was always meant to be,
For we will always worship destiny!
Berlin, Moscow, Paris, Warsaw,
Valetta, Washington,
Brussels, Cairo, Rome, Tokyo,
Vienna & London,
Pace round PEACE, a pack of wolves approaching Armageddon.
Earth
1656
Sun-King
your smile was my sun anon,
you created upon the earth beauty with your ways,
and my soul in your garden lives on
Knut Hamsun
To be a Frenchman is to feel a king
& if a king of France then feel a god,
The fourteenth Louis, near life’s fountain spring,
Unnerving ancyent nations with his nod;
Thro cocksure steel
& arrogantine steel
His legions conquer Lille, Alsace & Flander’s field.
As godheads in their realmis reign,
Build palaces in the sky,
Upon the Parisian plain
Would heaven on earth arise,
Where courtiers sip dry champagne
& chandeliers surprise;
The sycophantic fervour of Versaille,
Were men on earth ever esteem’d so high?
He builds a string of starry forts
From Verdun to Gravelines,
Then fills the ports with thrilling sorts –
Many a tough marine –
Combine these with her mountains & Europa’s queen serene.
France
1684
Siege of Vienna
The bird in me awoke again
Its cry spread anguish
In the heart of my kingdom
Nimrod Bena Djangrang
Islamic spectres on Austria fell,
Vienna must, for Europa, stand firm,
Else Pasha & the Turkish infidel
Into the west & thro their wives would worm;
Aiming the guns
At Allah’s grand empire,
More bonfires than are suns, the Kahlenburg on fire.
As constant as a perfect waves
That rolls into Biaritz,
The Sipahi slip to their graves
In the death-deep city pits,
Tho’ conquest human honour craves
From these far-flung limits,
Facing superior technology,
Fled the apex of Turkish history.
The royal horses are preserv’d,
Churches Hosannah sing,
Islam unnerv’d, Europe preserv’d,
Her internicine spring,
When bleeding for ones empire breeds purpose in existing.
Vienna
1688
Axis & Allies 