RD

[dedalus]

Gallant comrades, knights of the air,

the enemy cannon shells all narrowly missing,

and then not missing, smoke trails,

an epic crash landing, concussion, wounds

and a head gone to hell for the rest of your life.

 

Convalescent, gaunt, somewhat heroic,

shoved off to a posting to the US of A,

a twilight life between the proper embassy

and the dark clandestine forces in New York

who worked on American opinion.

 

There was a friendship, more of a rivalry,

with the dashing Ian Fleming, a long series

of competitive sexual conquests, take a look

at our flyboy hero! The Ambassador, wise, thought

otherwise, so our boy was to be shipped off home!

 

Churchill (must have been) over-ruled him,

and so our slightly chastened hero remained

to wow the widows of Washington, and more

enthusiastically, their young and nubile daughters,

until a strange thing happened.

 

He became the all but adopted son

of Garner, the populist Vice-President,

(a good man in many unremembered ways)

and so the British cause was openly advanced

in the fraught neutral months before Pearl Harbor.

 

The story unwinds, as all stories do,

and in time FDR, a twinkling wily crocodile,

dropped Garner, not before brazenly lying to him,

just another lazy typical patrician occurence,

one among many. He brought in Truman.

 

He dies. By then the war is almost over

and our British agent, our friend of the great,

gets summarily dumped back into postwar Britain,

which is a land of austerity and rationing

and little scope for the imagination.

 

Never mind. Time to embark on a new career.

 

He writes ghoulish stories for little children

which the little horrors read with fiendish glee,

he becomes quite rich and famous, a worry to all parents,

a long-fanged grinning troll from Scandinavian forests,

until, not so long ago, he went and died. Even his children,

reluctantly, on camera, allowed he was strange ….

 

Some books seem to live forever, people either buy or steal them,

and so I think Dahl will carry on, like HH Munro (Saki), like Bram Stoker,

and he will survive for centuries with other minor greats, because

unapologetic weirdness, the real thing … is so hard to ignore.

Edited July 25, 2010 by dedalus

[tonyv]

Fascinating, Brendan. I was prompted to read the entire Wikipedia article on Dahl. I loved this part:

 

He writes ghoulish stories for little children

which the little horrors read with fiendish glee,

he becomes quite rich and famous, a worry to all parents,

a long-fanged grinning troll from Scandinavian forests,

until, not so long ago, he went and died. Even his children,

reluctantly, on camera, allowed he was strange ….

 

Some books seem to to live forever, people either buy or steal them,

and so I think Dahl will carry on, like HH Munro (Saki), like Bram Stoker,

and he will survive for centuries with other minor greats, because

unapologetic weirdness, the real thing … is so hard to ignore.

"A long-fanged grinning troll from Scandinavian forests" seemed quite apropos.

 

Tony

[Larsen M. Callirhoe]

wow, what wonders are out there. what conviction. i write for stuff like this. excellent poem. ithink you should of titled itby hisfull name.

 

victor