Naming SS Divisions
Those great missed jokes –
Blond Ballet Dancers or Fluffy Ducklings –
never smeared their gross irony
(the more secure Romans named
a regiment Dalmatian Sparrows).
Some concealed seed of pity
flowering in war’s unpredictability
must’ve been the biggest threat:
Savage Wolves hunted in their turn;
The Eagle nursing a broken wing.
Safer to echo Führer and Party:
Hitlerjugend; Horst Wessel.
Or Volk ideals of racial being
and commandeered history:
Das Reich; Nordland; Wiking.
Only one eponymised some
less disingenuous, more
determining essence instead;
part-genus boast, part-prescience:
Totenkopf: Death’s Head.
Craig Dobson has had poetry and short fiction published in several UK, US and European magazines. He lives and works in the UK.
Pulsebeat Poetry Journal 