Duce
Staring, staring
stralunato jack in the box,
Muss pops up
after the Great War,
reforming the Milan fascio;
that heavy head, granite jaw,
eyes staring the rigor of conviction
in those ripe early years
of the Era Fascista.
Camicie Nere, blackshirts, everywhere,
would-be Rodomontes
spouting mighty boasts and threats
to enemies unsought and untried;
castor oil or worse for those at home
who disown the redeemed Fatherland.
From a decrepit regime
tottering in poverty
Duce boldly takes the stage,
takes the reins,
an educated public man
marinated in his debased
and labored Romanitas.
Stoutly strutting,
posturing on the balcony
of the Palazzo di Venezia
and captured
in the rotogravures;
jutting massive chin
rolling rapid speech
his vision clear
right down the line:
Populo italiano!
L'Italia ha finalmente il suo impero!
We burghers feared him,
middling men,
La nobilità looked down
their noses at him,
but from a hard life,
della vita nell'asprezza,
those others loved him,
inspired by his hoarse raucous
call to arms, noble leader
before a frenzied cheering horde
of aspiring Garibaldis.
Duce cracking the whip
and barking away
fioco, fioco,
at his future legions.
As it turns out,
none of Duce's strategies
were close to the truth
of durable leadership
or the people's will to follow;
not in the least.
The backbone of Italia fascista
weak and vulnerable;
passo Romano or no,
a shaky transient imperium,
underpinned by military parades,
Giovinezza booming in the streets,
prolix bombast, fascist catchwords,
all manner of factitious relics
the faked bones and outer remains
of a long-gone Rome of the Caesars.
As it turns out,
stuck on that big rock,
Gran Sasso,
Muss realized his limitations
of time and place,
man's overreach exceeds,
leaving a lonely prisoner
staring at blank walls
even as the lonely baboon
after the zoo shuts at night.
All behind him,
those stirring earlier times,
pane e benessere,
the battle for grain,
standing arms akimbo
ridiculous, oversized
on a petite Fiat tractor,
photos in Ostia and Naples,
the white faux-naval uniforms,
a sedate dance or two
here or there
with a contadina,
bonafica in the Pontine Marshes;
the whole lot of good times,
high times, hard times
lost in the unforgiving present.
Snatched from Gran Sasso
an old dog on Hitler's leash,
Salo and defeat
collapse complete
and then a run for it,
shot down on the shores of Lake Como
kicked at, spat on, pissed on in Milan
and then hung by his heels with Clara
from a convenient girder
in a gas station;
two brutalized bedraggled corpses,
upside down,
the final indignity.
A harsh wind
out of nowhere
carries the words
of Dante Alighieri,
of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso
from far far away,
canto by canto
and no use to Muss,
devoted reader
of great poets,
dead at last, ma dai!
and beyond the reach
of their magnificent oeuvre.
Duce, a noi!
Ghostly memories
and worth nothing,
least of all
to those friends and enemies
who knew him best
and for the rest of the world
a wretched end,
a harsh finita la commedia
for a failed dictator.
Jack D. Harvey’s poetry has appeared in Scrivener, The Comstock Review, Pulsebeat Poetry Journal, Typishly Literary Magazine, The Antioch Review, The Piedmont Poetry Journal and elsewhere. He has been a Pushcart nominee and over the years has been published in a few anthologies. He has been writing poetry since he was sixteen and lives in a small town near Albany, New York.
Pulsebeat Poetry Journal 