May, 1945

 That fine, all but forgotten poet Peter Porter would have been 95 today. In an effort to keep his memory alive, I've written about him quite often  on this blog – e.g. here and here – and posted several of his shorter poems. Here, to mark the day, is another, a Petrarchan sonnet about the bitter end of the Nazi regime: 

May, 1945

As the Allied tanks trod Germany to shard
and no man had seen a fresh-pressed uniform
for six months, as the fire storm
bit out the core of Dresden yard by yard,

as farmers hid turnips for the after-war,
as cadets going to die passed Waffen SS
tearing identifications from their battledress,
the Russians only three days from the Brandenburger Tor –

in the very hell of sticks and blood and brick dust
as Germany the phoenix burned, the wraith
of History pursed its lips and spoke, thus:

To go with teeth and toes and human soap,
the radio will broadcast Bruckner's Eighth
so that good and evil may die in equal hope.

(Actually it was the Adagietto from Bruckner's Seventh – written in response to Wagner's death – that was played on German radio on the first day of May, 1945. Hearing it, the art historian Ernst Gombrich, who was working for the BBC World Service, inferred that it must mean Hitler was dead, and immediately informed Churchill. He was right. Porter makes the Seventh the Eighth to achieve the necessary near-rhyme with 'wraith' – justifiable poetic licence, I think.)