After The Absolute Invasion
'Chipped memorabilia gathered dust
on shelves baring with time, soon depleted
for a china alternative to money,
value per pro a hijacked currency.
The invasion left the white table cloth
infiltrated but quietly intact
hidden in an upstairs drawer with mats
the disordered looting never reached.
Only unaccustomed mould found a way
into the fibre, to keep that condition
for years until the arrival of soap
allowed by the charitable victor.
With defeat, hungry collaboration,
liaison, gutter liaisons, whispered
talk, and the dominance of the Party.
At table, the Party line laid for all
put in a way the soldiers never could
and family life upstairs in a shroud.
The later, deep stage of the invasion
was not looting, which all knew would pass,
it was the whitening knuckles of fear
at the throat at every gasping breath.
Fear took hold by the hour, and with fear
a labyrinthine and nervous distrust
with the inside track of the maze soon not
obvious money, but packed dates to meet
the right people with the right tie and card,
now electronic with guarded access.
Blunt knives laid correctly on the table,
point facing point, were soon opposing tips
of a hardening differential
erecting bastions to knotting tension
and betrayal and coercion sat with
the forks and knives of a humid meal
clattering onto unfilled noisy plates
in silences hanging like oppression.
After avoiding total destruction,
peace crept up to the broad eaves of the house
to join the cobwebs and lost summer heat
trapped in a shadow hiding from shadows'
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First performed at Torriano Meeting House
for John Rety Editor Hearing Eye c.1988
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Acoustic Street, Packed Square
Once junketing, boisterous and flagrant
flags like a violent serenade swung
below a balcony and hung on sills
for the patriotic parades thumping-
the shouts far-reaching and demonstrative-
through the acoustic street to a packed square,
cobblestones stamped by the blackening boot
of loft nationalism on the march,
darkened at each turn, each deafening move
sparking metal on ripped, powdering stone.
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Museum Fur Die Geschichte Der Stadt
The picture guide flaunts a panegyric
on the liberation in defeat,
alive with a socialist lyric,
the 'reds' romping a sympathetic street.
War damage cricks the skeleton of fact
for the pock-marked, soot-blackened museum.
The paint un-brushed since the pre-attack pact
mars a reconstructing mausoleum.
Mirror examines corridor mirror
that never swam with the changing terror.
====================================
Insomnia, Leipzig 1982
A wind howls out of the Ukraine,
solemnising, loathed winter and summer,
as crowds tug a runway fence
imprisoned by Potsdam, the Revolution.
Crouched, green traffic police bivouac
in camouflaged tents, Saxon soldiers
by the cracking concrete Nazi autobahn,
storm an accident over ridged ruts-
meeker than our Stasi City Control,
rotoring sleep in a food shortage.
Freighting the brown coal to save diesel,
trams, screaming, buckle their undercarriage-
perpetual, the shriek of sagging trams
run, overwrought, through the inhuman night,
shunting quieter than the Russian judder
in the helicopters circling Leipzig.
The streets are long, trapped
by the curfew's cold starvation
and the sharp echo of the peak-capped
patrols loitering the night towards you.
Awake, the hammering regime will whip
the subjugated protest of a brain
in sleep; loyalties twist
and meet the re-directed scythe.
Forming below the frieze of a façade,
ice juts on the cell glass of the torture
room in a cream tower block for the barred.
Below 'Verboten' a skull and crossbones.
Old histrionics peel in a light breeze
when a few leave, to go bugging black telephones.
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Fluorescent Grave
Here, torturing water-clocks drip terror
to adumbrate a stuttering truth
that, eviscerated in a damp chair
trickling through a labyrinth of proof
is wrung out, flexed in a fluorescent grave
lit roof to floor for those shoring a wall
under lights; the rant and savaging rave
of Stalinism damned taps Luther's call.
No church, the state, sure-firing the mandate
for after-life re-housing; state's unhoused
go to the pit, the spark in clay there dowsed,
the passage short, and rarely intricate.
=====================================
The Permanent Camp
The commander is at his littered desk,
and his turning desk is above the world
and of the world. The camp is not very new.
Someone is summoned every hour
from the shadows into the angle-poise glare
and the glare from the tiled square ceiling,
every other square being a light
to lighten us in our hour of darkness.
Someone is delegated to instruct
someone else to find a third party
in the crowded, hard small room on the right,
and instruct them to find someone else...
Sour cabbage from underground kitchens
and a continual state of tension
rises like a smell from the half-open
vents and hatches in the mid-morning calm.
A door opening could bring early death-
the wanton end of supine affliction.
At the end of the thirteenth corridor
you turn left, then right, take the stairs, go down...
Suffocation more than subterranean
at the throat...cabbages will never know.
Someone who was found will turn a handle
and then finalise the final circuit.
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Tea Room Flowering In The Spring
At the junction of the slogged confused road
stretching from Aarhuis down to Genoa
and thawed taking Paris to Novgorod,
via imperium, via regia…
'At fair time the Hotel Astoria shut
to all but parked limousines from the east
and west, the revolving doors watched, a whore
state tagged and tested. Locals lose a feast
of the plentiful. For a spring Sunday
there's limp tea at the Hauptbahnhof tea rooms
chrome as the calmer days of the Weimar,
somewhere to meet old friends. Quiet talk plumes
like flowers and smoke. There the men embarked
to take dark troop-trains to war after war,
each one worse than the one before; they barked
up an international armed furore
once too often.' Left alone, she thought how
Bismarck rattled the softening British
their machine-tool production to turn down,
how for the Kaiser killing grew lavish,
on the Weimar, invoking the Third Reich
ballooned with gaseous, poisoning lies
and potions burning a 'pre-emptive' strike;
and after fifty years of lies, truth dies'.
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The Battle of The Nations
(Leipzig 1813)
The linden trees in Leipzig soar today
restoring lime to a war-smashed vista
for the torn country of a mind at play
for now walled in, without a fresh visa,
the march and the counter-march on civic dust,
once rising with the lark, tramping to song
impaled spruce trees with military lust-
shrill drama, consigned to history's throng,
with adulation mad with fervour-
come to a halt like gravel in repose
crossed by the broad track of foreign armour
petering out on pebbles in crushed snows.
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Confinement
Craving even a
mute euphoria
then a hedgehog, rolled
round for the winter,
prickly, dreaming a
hibernation quashed-
the sudden crush
starting to spatter-
dislocated to
a windowless room
at such a remove
of suffering there
the sun, and the moon,
and the stars, bow out
and no waters break.
=====================================
Watchtower
Unimpeded
by the tortured strands
twisted to thread
the wind is free
at the barbed wire
at the cut tree
at the linked posts
the never farmed lands,
the captured ghosts
the wind is at
the high watchtower,
the guard who spat
at the cut throat
and the wind
conveys no litany.
=====================================
From 'MittelEuropa' (An Elegy) ring-bound 1988
with some revisions 2018 by Christopher Truman
=====================================
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