Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

(...continued from Issue 12)

Part 5

By dawn, Borin had been found alive but concussed under the rubble of the castle keep’s high tower. He shook with fear as he thought of the Jew and his God.

The castle physician, Severin, who had also seen the lightning strike, put Borin’s right arm in a plaster cast and gave him twenty stitches to his skull. Borin, who previously had never been hurt, was so shocked and amazed that he could hardly speak. He drank tea from a porcelain cup as his hands shook. Severin saw that he was prematurely aged - his hair had turned snow white overnight.

Borin’s aristocratic wife, Grand Duchess Diana, now made her appearance, arriving from the village tavern where she had rooms above. After cogniting the situation perspicaciously she showed her newly-neurotic husband her lack of fingernails on both hands – these nails had all dropped off whilst she slept. Suspecting witchcraft, despite the fact that East Prussia’s last witches had been burned alive in the 1620’s, she had summoned a Lutheran priest who now accompanied her to Borin’s sickbed.

Severin said “Please don’t disturb the chancellor – he requires complete rest. I am preparing a potion of mugwort and dandelion for him to imbibe.” “But,” his wife argued, “he needs theocratic help, for he is obviously a victim of that Jewish rabbi Julius Hector Rosenwald.”

“Yes,” said Father Geigner, the area’s only mystic as he thought of himself, “Borin needs divinity!”

Part 6

As Father Geigner spoke, a massive fissure opened in the stone floor of the keep, and Borin’s sickbed disappeared down it to Severin’s and Diana’s horror and screams. The guards arrived from the hall outside, and one had a massive heart attack as he viewed the mad scene. He died with his boots on, going to hell with a silent start in a fit of melancholy. Severin, Diana Borin and Geigner fled the room with great angst and cosmic dread, shouting to the slow-witted guards to evacuate the castle, yes, to abandon it to God.

Lightening, gales and earthquakes were not normal in this rural region of Prussia.

Was Borin dead too, experiencing his second shock of the morning? Or was his usually resilient torso clinging on to life down the fissure cleft in the floor?

Assembling as a whole company of nearly 200 Prussians on the narrow plain beyond the moat, the leaderless castle crowd were addressed by Geigner, Severin and Bendtner who urged them to breathe deeply, relax, calm down and quell their deep feelings of anxiety.

Rosenwald, whose military operation in league with the invisible God of Love had destroyed a castle and demoralized a battalion of dragoons, was putting his feet up back home is a distant village just inside Russian– controlled Poland. As he drank tea after tea from a samovar, he prayed to his Almighty that the Prussian spy networks, vicious dragoons and Lutheran priesthood could never locate him.

Part 7

Ludwig Borin, Chancellor of Königsgracht University 1732-1770, was hauled up from the crevice in what had once been his study, office and library, by six strong guards who had recovered their wits and poise and bravely re-entered the castle. Borin had broken his other arm now, and four ribs, and was in absolute agony. He thought that he was dying but he wasn’t. Brought across the drawbridge to the plain where a makeshift medical tent was constructed, he chatted with his wide-eyed spouse Diana, with Severin the physician, and with Bendtner the captain and with Geigner the vicar, all of whom were shocked and newly religious. Laudanum – a mixture of opium and wine – was administered to Borin, an application which cheered him up.

Two hours later, a cavalry troop arrived from Berlin with the news that the King Friedrich Hohenzollern had died of a heart attack and that his eldest son, Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, had assumed the regency – these troopers had ridden through the night. Borin, in no fit shape to welcome their captain, and who secretly believed that might was right (“force is the last resort and the optimum response”), now dwelled on his new idea that God’s power was the greatest and that it must be made useful to Prussia. He gave up all ideas of revenge against Rabbi Rosenwald, whom he would never see again.

Borin, Bendtner, Severin and Geigner – true to Jehovah’s righteous curse – never fathered any children and led unhappy lives with constant urges to be sadistic towards their friends and superiors.