Château de Pierrefonds, Oise, Picardie, France. Donjon drain-pipe.
SS Obergruppenführer Joachim
Ribbentrop, Hitler’s diplomatic shill
was hanged at Nuremberg in
1946 for crimes against humanity.
He’d cheered on the Shoah
and shaken hands with Stalin,
setting the stage for World War II.
Joachim is a Hebrew name
and means “raised by God.”
Born in the spring of 1893,
he was a gambler, took a flutter on Hitler’s
spree; the stars perhaps decreed
his last words standing on the gallows door: “Ich werde dich wiedersehen”
(“I’ll see you again”).
In 1950, one Sergey Viktorovich
Lavrov showed up in Moscow, a baby
Kalantaryan, meaning “Big Shot.”
Raised with that surname,
half-Armenian, he ought not be
playing the beard for shame,
as to what he knows full well,
born a long, sad, sordid century ago.
Metempsychosis doesn’t quit,
Hindus believe: hungry ghosts
swarm up avidly from hell.
And who’s to say, if so, that
Joachim did not in 1946 foretell
his resurrection in his final knell?
Par for the course, that bet,
if made, has still not paid off yet.
But Clio loves to rhyme
her rulings Rhadamanthine.
Note: Angstloch = German, “fear hole”; the trapdoor opening into a “bottle dungeon” (or oubliette) in a medieval castle. See, e.g., https://images.app.goo.gl/6iE1apQaGEkdELLt7.
Ogruf was the familiar abbreviation for Obergruppenführer, an SS rank very roughly equivalent to general.