Man had wept
as he watched the fall of Lucifer,
not so much due to the tragedy itself,
rather than the cutting, crystalline
beauty of the Icarian descent
After the absence of three hundred years
since the forgotten burning of Magdeburg(1),
when the Devil had returned to Europe
from the smoldering ashes of
South Africa(2),
Namibia(3),
and Congo Free State(4),
the soft hills of Picardy were
embroidered in gold
with roses and clematises
And since our girl had been fed with naught
but the shimmering positivism of Auguste Comte
from a silver spoon manufactured in Manchester,
beneath the charmingly moorish face of a lover
and a Prada he wore
quilted with railway, nation-state,
Art nouveau, electricity,
and liberal democracy,
never in her wildest, most horrendous nightmares,
-one of which was mere few dozen Jews dying in pogroms-
could she possibly imagine
His robust fingers,
so caressingly wrapped around her neck and cheek,
concealing the bayonet claws
of mustard gas and industrialized massacres
A god whose name we only knew
and whose warmth we only read of,
had called for the blood sacrifice of utmost purity,
to be fed to its altars for the promises of salvation
As the Devil ravaged her body frozen as the Siberian gulags
and her soul smoking away to the chimneys of Auschwitz,
he raked his nail to her cheek seized by the throat,
lasciviously whispering,
‘Here, this,
This is the kiss of progress
You have thrown so warmly your arms around’
Ninety-eight years had passed
since that fatal kiss of a lovesome late June,
though the summer days had returned in Picardy,
roses and clematises
no longer bloom on her hills
except as tributes for silenced youth
which petals lay as a civilization’s tears
as shroud over a massive bomb-crater of La Boisselle(5)
And never again, could she fall in love,
notwithstanding all the lover’s whispers
of the rational organization of human society
or the ultimate liberation of the working class,
for in her heart have always lingered,
the shadow of the Devil
whose chilling warmth of the Lubyanka cells
and the fiery dearth of the crematoriums of Poland
we had shared as whole, consummate days of youth
For there lies a tragic aestheticism
in deflowering of a rose just about to bloom,
for one delirious sense of snapping off the stem,
we had burned away all ardor of love for a century
---------
(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SackofMagdeburg
(2) Concentration camps were first used as means of civilian incarceration by the British against the Afrikaaners during the Second Boer War
(3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HereroandNamaquaGenocide
(4) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CongoFreeState#Humanitariandisaster
(5) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lochnagar_Crater
