In Pérenchies, and: Advance, and: Clearing Station
Rent from DeepDyve- In Pérenchies, and: Advance, and: Clearing Station
In Pérenchies
Just above the window, the black raftersof a burned-out rooftop play across a skypale as paper. A wasteland’s sheet music,an immense five-line staff for massive notes,
playing the same hellish theme for months—the gloomy D minor of cannons, their eyesround like rings, the presto of the machine gun,the symphonic surprise of grenades.
Houses nod and cheer with their gables,until they swoon into piles. A bouquet of shrapnelis presented. A syncopated fusillade applauds.Great pauses fall silent over eternity.
Advance
The troops march, march, lean and wildwith effort. Others lie in the ditch.In the field, horses stand under heavy blanketsturned toward the sunset.
Clouds hang heavy—heavenly intestines,slowly digesting the earth. [End Page 65] Wagons drive by. Bonfires burn.Soldiers stand around them like gray giants.
Gravely, they radiate like golden flames.Wrapped in long coats at the muddy edges of fields,I see already the ribcages and bonesthat today, strangely and silently, still move.
Clearing Station
Straw rustling everywhere.Candle-stumps solemnly stare.Across the nocturnal vault of the church,moans and muffled words go drifting.
There is a stench of blood, filth, rot, sweat.Dressings ooze under torn uniforms.Clammy, trembling hands and ruined faces.Bodies rest propped upright but their dead heads loll.
In the distance the battle thunders on.Day and night, groaning and grumbling.To the dying, waiting patiently for their graves,it must echo in their ears like the voice of God. [End Page 66]
Wilhelm Klemm was a regimental field surgeon in the German Third Army during World War I. His poems about the war appeared in Gloria!, the Anthology of Die Aktion, and Aufforderung. A limited edition of his collected poems was issued in Germany in 2012.
Ted Genoways is the author of several books, including Walt Whitman and the Civil War (U of California P), named a Best Academic Book of 2010 by the American Library Association, and the editor of The Selected Poems of Miguel Hernández (U of Chicago P), the great poet of the Spanish Civil War. Genoways’s nonfiction book about Hormel Foods and the Great American Recession is forthcoming from HarperCollins.
