7.Feasts of November by Duncan McGibbon (good books for high schoolers .txt) 📖

/> to child-murder burnt with
Pedro de Arbués burnt in Avila
in the just fires.
Yet this is my church,
my communion,
despite the white walls,
despite the language.
In this most Christian of towns,
I give Ivan’s ticket to safety
back to Dostoevsky,
whose appointment
for execution was to-day,
that he should give it back to Job.
It is enough , Marina,
that Jews be Jews
to save the poets.
"Imia tvoe," the name ‘Blok’ lifts like bird.
when Blok’s Twelve march down this street
and claim to take the murdered from their past.
The bridal liars will laugh louder than
at a dished in Quixote.
Hollowed be your name, literary God.
To think this month
could have been called Tiberit,
but the old misery
feared his children
running out of months
and the dynasty of time.
He need never have worried.
Even time can’t cure Roman fervor
of Bar Kokhba’s curse.


17. Day Zero
If the root was not whole, how could the number be? They were in every place we looked, that late autumn, the crane-flies. They were creatures from a landscape of time that had forgotten them, massing for some doomed exodus from the school playing fields to the promised insect reservation. There in Day Zero, it would be some average Bronze age morning when someone started to write and someone invented the hour to help count what still wasn’t there, or to stop that irritating new wheel, perhaps, despite their cuneiform wedges and the shadows cast on Noon Universal Time.

It was Scaliger, bored by his Poitou camp duties decided to re-invent time by adding the 15 Roman Law years to the 19 lunar years and the 28 solar years then turned up to that bronze age January morning and called it Julian zero after his father, having traced the mathematics of the hour to coincide on this remote landscape of number.
And Zero lived among them and they did not know and Big Fly Zero began to eat into time. Released from Scaliger’s timebox, it attacked and ate its way through to eighteen fifty eight and Orsini was shot by Louis Naploeon, Mendelssohn’s wedding march became a license for musical anarchism. Tchaikovsky was accused of the marais des cygnes massacre.
Darwin and Wallace personally said they saw God naturally rearing finches to select.
The Lutine bell was dropped into the Sterling sea. Queen Victoria told President Buchanan
to shut up over the transatlantic cable. Denver was abolished. Mountaineers descended the Eiger for the first time since the bronze age and Big Ben fell out of its perfidious tower. Cape lions were vermin before the Day was trapped by Astronomers to become

Verdronken Land , from which the crane-flies spontaneously
germinated out of spent matches and rusty nails. They had come to warn against the folly of State learning, to counsel patience and give up the squalid struggle for dignity. They squashed themselves on my Maths homework with their straight wings laid on the abdomen. The books drowned in the of swell of powers that shifted blood-red, blood-red for the students dead, in Prague, betrayed by Halifax’s bell in the solitary tower of Westminster, for the students at Athens Polytechnic when the AMX 32 tank came crashing through the gates while I was still a student and in Prague later, while I painted the walls of Radnor Gardens and considered schooling for my children.

The Cloverland of my Grammar School, drowned in surds
If the root was not whole, how could the number be? I heeded the crane-flies, read Catholic books in Scripture lessons. Rootless, I joined Hugh in Lincoln, Hilda in Whitby, recognised Elisabeth of Hungary as my Queen, left surds and my life unsimplified.


Chapter Five:The Kalends
18. Night Window
Canone a la Sesta. i.m. Paul Eluard
1. Exposition
Jammed, the window is open to the night sky.

The mirror we bought at Camden Market
stands against the wall in the attic
bedroom on the Lower Mortlake Road.
The March Cosmopolitan,
on the raffia chair, Gia Carangi,
reflected in the glass.

I will not write your word,
though I repeat your name,
Eugène Grendel.

Venus, low in the sunset,
Mars rising in Leo, the silver fingers
of rare Leonids index themselves.

From the gut of winter loss,
Licinius’ feast of the sun.
became, instead, a day to dedicate
the tomb of St Peter,
beside the circus where
the Roman crowd
bellowed for a Jew’s death.

The light of the Genii,
of the Circus at night,
Mercury of the Proust crater
and on the moon, the Daguerre,
the sad immortals of the race
whose light masks death.
A piano glitters on the ear.

The martins have all gone now,
leaving the sparrows in their nests.

I will not write your word,
despite your songs I know,
Eugène Grindel

2. Episode 1

First entry

We can build a church in the night sky.
Music will feed us crumbs of loss.
It is the tunic of the Lord,
the seamless gown,
which was not rent,
despite the dice throw.

Answer

“Therefore, of the one and only Church
there is one body and one head,
not two heads like a monster “
and can we remember those
who were faithful to Israel
and whom the Blood Libel betrayed-
even with one head , a monster?

It is winter and the martins have gone.
Our shrine is a borrowed nest.

Second Entry

Come into the night sky .
The Sun now sets so early
that we can see the constellations,
Vinteuil’s, or Ravel’s, or Saint-Saen’s
Septet; Ursa Major; visible at night
with the plough and the seven stars.
The Lord makes ‘ayish, Kesil
the sign of winter, Kimah,
by the Moon, and the constellations
of the southern sky;
a dry muted trumpet .
The Lord does huge and unsearchable
things, and wonderful things without number.
Music wreathes its trail of voices.
and turns to enter the day of making,
a day for dedicating,
to see the summer triangle,
that sign in the night of a stranger.


Answer

Come into the night sky

The Soviet sky above Eastern Galicia,
according to the Ribbentrop-Molotov telescope
November, Nineteen Forty Two.
and the people from the shadows,
crowding in to Lviv, the counter subject,
refugees fleeing eastward from
Nazi-occupied Europe.
under Deneb, the Einsatzgruppen
under Vega, the Einsatzgruppen
under Altair, the Nachtigall battalion of
free Ukrainians in German uniform.

Second Entry

The Sun is now sets so early that
we can still see
the Pogrom constellations, which is why
some make a God of its loss.


Answer

The Nazi sky above Eastern Galicia
ayish, Kesil, the sign of winter, Kimah
Thanks to your art, we see the dead now.
Petlura Days with stars fading to nothingness,
after being marched to the Jewish
cemetery or to the prison on
Łąckiego street and the Ghetto,
Lyra, the first group entry,
then the selections,
“action under the bridge"
fetching sul ponticello
the elderly and sick.

I will not write your word,
despite the pain of never knowing you,
Eugene Grindel.


3. Episode 2

First entry

Aquila, the banner of the eagle
under which enter the
Aktion Reinhard lorries
-left in the evening sky –
and it is the brightest star in
each of these constellations
that make up the summer triangle.

I will not write your word,
though I stood by your grave,
Eugène Grendel

Answer

Though these constellations
were directly overhead in the summer,
they are low down now in the west,
ducking under the western horizon
at around Nine pm, but they are still ideal
for late afternoon, or early evening observing.
the star that forms the head of Cygnus,
or Orpheus, is called Albireo,
centuries after the extinction of the fire
Therefore, of the one and only Church
there is one body and one head,
not two heads like a monster.

I will not write your word
on verdicts that whispered
of night when it was day,
Eugene Grindel.
.

Counter-Subject

First entry

Fifteen thousand Jews
were taken to the Klepariv
railway station and deported to the Belzec
extermination camp, each one its special radiance,
a blue and golden double star
that is a beautiful sight through a small telescope.
Notice Cygnus is flying directly downwards,
how many Jews were also forced
to work for the Wehrmacht
and the ghetto's German administration,
especially in the nearby Janowska labor camp.
On June the Twenty Fourth and Twenty Fifth
Nineteen Forty Two, two thousand
Jews were taken to the labor camp;
only one hundred and twenty
were used for forced labor,
and all of the others were shot.
Notice Cygnus, or Orpheus,
is flying directly downwards
head-first into the western horizon.,
a glissando runs to plucked chords.

I will not write the word
on a bullet trace that copied it,
Eugène Grendel.


Answer

High in the east, is the quick, recognisable,
W-shape of the constellation Cassiopeia;
the women waiting behind the barbed wire,
some smiling gently at an armed guard
whose face we cannot see.
Many who were not deported, including
local orphans and hospital in-patients,
were shot.
Below Cassiopeia is Perseus,
while all the stars are pin sharp,

the music, Vinteuil’s, or Beethoven’s
withers to the bass. The martins too are silent.
On September 1, 1942, the Gestapo
hanged the head of Lviv’s Judenrat
dangling down like a belt
and members of the ghetto's Jewish police force.

I will not write your word,
though I still hear your voice,
Eugène Grendel


Answer

About sixty five thousand Jews stayed.
Winter approached with no warmth or water,
leading to typhus. To the left of Albireo is the
Dumbbell Nebula, the left over
remnant of a star that, swelled out to form a
nebula, left over, some one thousand five hundred years ago.
that gave up shining under Justinian’s hate.

I will not write your word that wrote these graves,
Eugène Grendel


4. Middle Entry

Episode One

First entry

Marcel, sleuthing time without an editor,
“Grâce à l’art, au lieu de voir
un seul monde, le nôtre, nous le voyons
se multiplier, et autant
qu’il y a d’artistes originau.”

The violin rises on a distant note.

Answer

Between January fifth to the seventh, nineteen forty three,
another fifteen to twenty thousand Jews and
as many worlds, including the last members
of the Judenrat, were shot outside of the town.
The red supergiant star to the top left is Betelgeuse,
and to the bottom right is the white hot star Rigel.
“After the extinction of the fire,
it still sends a special radiance.”
And finally, we have beautiful Orion.
In the middle of both is Orion's belt of three bright stars.