Babes in Arms. The Dark Legacies of Total War. (Revised).

                         1.

Seven little words
repeated with an understated reverence.

Shoah 
Porajmos 
Holocaust 

                 Dachau 
                 Buchenwald 
                 Auschwitz 

Birkenau 

Black smoke swirling
Snake like into the sky

Schutzstaffel        SS       

Words whispered in darkness,
A canticle of death:
The hiss of the snake
Entering a darkened room,
All the windows blackened,
The shutters barred at night
With interlaced barbed wire.

Live snakes interlocked on broken glass; 
A parable of loss,
Despair beyond reason.  


                          2.

& Now,
              in another country,
At another time,
This nightmare of war, a popular TV fiction,
Revised, fleshed out, worked over,
Put on to bolster the schedules: -

                                                    & here,
Right through the night
& Safe at home, I stare into the eyes of long dead soldiers.
They parade, tall pallid Titans, through silent streets
& burnt out city centres, knives in belts, machine guns at the ready: -

Scuffed images captured by the newsreel cameras
Flashed up onto my plasma TV screen
To the sound of martial music.

Gaunt families crawling out of derelict houses,
Into a desert that was once their city.

Sad babies clutched to breasts now cold as winter;
Their fingers curled up tight like withered branches.

Old men waiting in line among the ruins
For a short truck ride to an unknown destination.

Press footage shot with an eye to the morning headlines.
Press footage shot without much love or pity.

The grainy newsreel cuts to another scene;
Soldiers handing sweets to starving children
Under a dark architrave of guns.

                             Filmed from above
At a discreetly fastidious angle,  The
results resembled a stylised Hollywood
Show; An awkward monochrome ballet
Conceived, at a moments notice, Without
much trouble, by a senior film technician.

                             3.

The soldiers dance like cobras in the sun,
Playing so deftly with the hungry children
That the children fear to move, scared to
                                                  sacrifice
One second of this deadly magic show,
                                                 this bleak
charade, and return to their shelters in the
                                                 rubble,
Their makeshift tents of stone.

The soldiers mime sweet arabesques of love,
Sprawled in the ooze,   the carcass of a dove.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter. 
January 30th. - February 5th. - 9th.- March 2nd. - 4th.  2013.
11th. September 2013. Revised February 11th. 2016.

4th. poem in sequence of Poems in Times of War.

I think this poem has relevance in respect of events taking place in Europe in 2015 - 2016. 


(A footnote to Babes In Arms).

                  1971.

The soldiers clown the arabesques of love,
Sprawled in the ooze, the carcass of a dove.


Trevor John Karsavin Potter. 
January 26th. 1972.