poems from the Morning Star

ISBN 978-1-90582-42-1

Edited by John Rety

John Rety (Rety Janos) who chose these poems was a Hungarian Jewish anarchist who survived Auschwitz (1944-45) because as a healthy youth he was sent to a labour battalion.  He escaped from the camp and trekked westwards to what became the British Zone in western Germany.  From that time until Hungary joined the EU he rejoiced in his ‘Stateless Person’ papers.  He recounted this in delightful article in Peace News.  Faced with having to choose a State he decided on the UK.  He had, after all, lived for more than six decades in England.  He ran poetry ‘sessions’ in the Quaker meeting house on Torriano Avenue, north London, (within shouting distance of Holloway and Pentonville prisons).  Morning Star, a Communist journal, – now decidedly non-sectarian – offered Rety another platform.

So what are the poems like?  Mostly excellent, and in all styles from offerings by Johannes Kerkoven his ‘visual [it used to be called 'concrete'] poetry’ includes Scrabble and Out of Work which is sardonically funny.  The oldest is Robert Burns’s Auld Lyne Sang there are a fair number of translations (Heinrich Heine and Victor Hugo appear) some are ‘political’, and none the worse for that.  A fair number are by ‘displaced persons’ / political exiles like Rety Janos. One offering, Jennifer Johnson’s Disconnection and Reconnection is about surviving the bombing of London Underground (specifically the Edgware Road station attack. in 2007).

It would be nonsensical to pick out a ‘best’ poem, or even a favourite the stuff is too good for that, and Rety was not in the business of pushing a particular ‘line’.  I (and it is emphatically a persona ‘ting’) was struck by Jeremy Kingston’s three poems.  The Taste of His Hair (p 69) is the only poem about sexual love – and is addressed to another man.  Paying for the Games is a (slightly) tiresome attack on the ‘trimming’ of other budgets to finance the Paralympic and Olympic Games.  How does Jeremy know that Shakespeare and Goethe weren’t sports fanatics?  The latter was a tennis player – I think?  We have, of course, been promised an ‘Olympic legacy’ – the ‘legacy’ will probably be a huge debt.  The Olympics really ought to be permanently centred on Athens, where they started.

Jeremy Kingston’s Being Pius is a wonderful piece of writing.  The sort of concentrated venom and hatred is startling – and very unusual, even ‘out of place’  – in the genteel purlieus of Anglo (even ‘Anglosphere’) poetry.  Here it is in full:

Observe Pope Pius, scraping Jews

like shitballs off his neat white shoes;

the gold for his pince-nez he took

from a girl’s jaw in Ravensbruck;

but now his pale eyes brim with pity

for the art-works in the Eternal City;

daily he offers prayers for them

at a statue of the B. V. M.

carved in white wood from Bethlehem.

Mary’s a Jewess he’ll accept,

he weeps remembering how she wept

to watch her son die on a tree

more slowly than with Zyklon-B.

We are naïve to be surprised

Pope John Paul wished him canonized.

— Deep in the Pit Pope Pius flits.

Now John Paul joins him there and sits

smirking with the hypocrites.

This was published on 24 October 2007.  It a fine example of Anglo self-satisfaction — and self-delusion.  Pius was personally involved in saving scores of thousands of Jewish people.  The Catholic Church in the Nazi Realm was under suspicion.  The encyclical Mitt brennender Sorge published under the name of Pope Pius XI, but written by Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (Pius XII from 1938) based on a draft by Cardinal Faulhaber, Archbishop of Munich did not help matters.  It had been ‘brewing’ for several years and published on March 10, 1937 – but dated March 14.

The Encyclical was written in German, was printed secretly in Germany, and circulated secretly to every Catholic church in the Nazi Realm, and thereby read publicly at every Mass on March 14, 1937, – Passion Sunday.  Some historians seem surprised that the Vatican did such a thing.  The consequences did not help Catholics in Germany, workers and masters who had printed the Encyclical lost their livelihoods.  Hundreds of priests, nuns, and other ‘religious’ were imprisoned and show trials mainly for alleged sexual offences took place.  Catholic groups that survived when Communist organisations had been dissolved were broken up.  Catholic politicians were put in concentration camps.   It’s possible to pick holes in the text – it did not specifically denounce Hitler or his Party by name – but at one point he and it are described as ‘monstrous’.

One looks forward to an Anglo poet wondering in print why (just as an example), the RAF and USAF never bombed Auschwitz.  They turned every German city and nearly every town into dustbowls, including Königsburg (now Kaliningrad) the capital of East Prussia hundreds of miles to the north east of Auschwitz.  They had the Nazi Realm’s air space at their mercy from at the latest mid-1944.  Not one bomb was dropped on a concentration or an extermination camp.  Was the fact that hatred and contempt for Jews was respectable in the US and UK a factor in this matter?

Seán McGouran

Then would I sing the stars

My every thought formed golden

My farts canned dear in jars

I’d be pompous I’d be stuffy

I’d bask aglow in my littered lane

I’d be wicked on how I’d suffer

I’d sigh whisper curse and blame

Locked doors my way would open

Charms my way befall

My heart would lie still frozen

My soul a cold and vacant hall

Young bodies next to mine would lie

Old fingers dry and bare

Men half my age but old enough

For whom I would not care

And near enough and dear enough

Remembrance would strongly stare

Sadly at this life of page

Real life neither dreamed nor dared

And so I wish such glories mine

My name caressed dumb in stone

Glories heaped and weaped upon

While I lie dust and bone

Silver-vizored, gauntleted

Roaring down the freeway

The wind in his nose and his throat

High-buckled to his neck and ox-leather overcoat

Stars at his elbows

Black lighting his hair

Willi at the truckstop

Drinking beer with Pachelbel

Back losers eacy way

Has taken no lessons from life

Sharp-bladed in his pocket a pearlhandled flick-knife

Knows where it’s leading

Old Pachelbel’s stare

Pach’s got a rooming-house

Winters in Alassio

Willi offers to stay

They’ll work something out overnight

Willi eyes the antiques, the silver in the lamplight

Pillow in his face

He’s strong as a bear

Wily old Pachelbel

Likes them naked, young and dead

Hauls him down the stairway

Throws him in the pit with the rest

There are sperm in his mouth and cigar-burns on his chest

The pearhandled knife

Lies under a chair

Six or eight weeks later

Pack’s a new young visitor

Thinks that it’s his birthday

Tries the ox-leather coat for size

Willi moves in the cement, opens lime-blinded eyes

Sighs from the cellar

Beware, or beware!

[Ivor C Treby]