HANSEL AND GRETEL’S SWARTZGEIST
(OR CHARMING PRINCE ADOLF)
What a charmer the wolf was!
How he could flash those teeth!
What a rapper!
Words—words rippled
With energy and force;
From his mouth; words
Ribboned around us.
We heard: “Gingerbread estates!
Thunderbird rides to Valhalla!
Deutschland über alles!”
What big eyes he had!
Organized—stepping
Up, down, around in order—
Propagandized—fired
To steel our innocence—
We engraved the key
Which kept us marching,
But wound too bold
For the sprockets to hold.
What big teeth he had!
He piped tunes we couldn’t resist.
But hobnails made us hesitate,
And those unappetizing human stockyards.
True, Thor with a crazy cross
Equals Shiva; but
By the time we knew
This Charley Chaplin guy was a con
And there was no golden goose,
He’d been popping us in the oven, like pies,
With four-and-twenty years of lies.
8/6/1981
"Hansel and Gretel's Swartzgeist" was first published in Monsters in a Half-way House, 1981. The persona is someone who had been under the spell of the leader who had led his people into catastrophe. He or she both admires and abhors the person who had seduced the nation into ruin. The poem alludes to a hodge-podge of fairytales, popular culture, and religions just as Naziism was a mishmash of icons, cults and slogans: Hansel and Gretel, Norse mythology, Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, Hinduism, The Pied Piper, Charley Chaplin, The Goose that Laid Golden Eggs, and Four-and-twenty Blackbirds.
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