(in memoriam Wyndham Lewis, 1882-1957)
Attend the shouting papers, be they Royalist or Red,
and review the endless registry of the never-ending dead.
Four years of nasty weather, but now the skies are clear,
and Memory is divided, like a Padre’s brand of queer.
Peguy and Danny Frazier died four years apart.
For one it was an ending, for one a patchy start.
That tender Serbian gunman, nineteen kleptoid years of age,
who plugged the royal couple till they tumbled off the stage.
Lads in their many millions, with balls as bright as tin,
sent flocking in their columns like butterflies to be pinned.
Oldtimers called it ‘Wipers’ and refused to toast the King.
For those who’d only just arrived, what a dreadful shocking thing!
The whistle of the enemy comes ghosting through the copse.
The rattling-tattling welcome that shears away their tops.
Coal dust for a halo, a head without a face,
the awkward slugging glory of an amputee’s embrace.
The poms they dropped by thousands, the Tommies ten times that,
the census-takers grumbled That’s no way to skin the cat.
A muddy boot kept kicking, while its partner stayed behind,
a saucer of medallions sautéed in cloudy wine.
The colonials sat frozen in a pond of Belgian slush,
plastercast and homesick for the snows of Hindu Kush.
A glimpse of modern Europe through a pre-assault barrage,
then home again to Amritsar with some lessons for the Raj.
Kut was just a sideshow belted with a jerk,
the young men of Yorkshire, rubbished a la Turk.
The Ottomans are memory, the Bedouin are free,
to finish what they started, fratriciding cheerfully.
Cavell and Von Richtofen have ivoried the sod.
The stumps that Grosz is sketching are black as little gods.
A wave is washing Greenland for Canadians going home,
with a clod of Vimy Ridge and a screw of Gallic chrome.
India’s oiling Suez to a nasty rubber sheen,
so forget the pillars of Moses, choose the void in between.
The Habsburgs are in Civvy Street, the Hun is quite defunct,
La Victoire is parceled out as booze and dope and c**t.
Eluard is back in Paris, where Gala’s grown perverse.
From one trench to another he’s not sure which one is worse.
Pilsudski’s on the lookout for a gap in Ukraine’s fence:
a map with ‘Poland’ on it, written in the present tense.
A prairie fire is smoking, the steppes are eating trains,
the Czechs caress their Vickers, (Asia’s bloating in the rains.)
The Spartakists are reeling with the Freikorps up their ass.
You can’t make a revolution and still Keep Off The Grass.
Pancho Villa’s stealing hubcaps in his border neighborhood,
while some of those who chased him sleep it off in Belleau Wood.
The Vatican is humming with memorials for the dead,
the confessionals are empty though not the whorehouse bed.
Blackshirts strut al dente, a violinist for a boss,
a gassed-out Austrian corporal plays with his Iron Cross.
The Kaiser’s in the Netherlands, Wilson’s at Versailles,
the Welshman and Le Tigre are carving up the pie.
Winston’s sent a letter to the local Bolshie rag,
reminding them that Brest-Litovsk gave little cause to brag.
He’s hymning Kronstadt’s gamble in life’s unfair roulette,
and innocently queries whether Trotsky broke a sweat.
Sidney Webb is spitting blossoms at the Monarch’s fourth estate,
and asks after His cousins, has He heard from them of late?
Four years of nasty weather but now the skies are blue.
Have you heard the latest, angel? It’s called the Spanish Flu.