No Loop’s Not an Open Spiral

Follow the wandering thread.

A mention of the battles

For Monte Cassino sends

The mind to St Benedict

And the unusual case

Of the Nazis carefully

Saving priceless artifacts

Ahead of Allied advance,

A fortunate salvation,

Since the advancing Allies,

Taking horrific losses,

Soon made the sort of mistake

That would become so common

In the next several decades

Of U.S. hegemony,

Concluding that the Abbey,

More than a thousand years old,

The oldest church in the West,

And just then unoccupied,

Concealed a Nazi unit,

Therefore bombing it to dust.

The thread extends to Walter

Miller, bomber tail gunner

And practicing Catholic,

Who took part in the bombing

Of the Abbey and later

Was inspired to write his own

Science fiction of the end

Of civilization saved

By monks as A Canticle

For Leibowitz. On a cliff

In the south Utah desert,

Near where Miller’s story’s set,

It seems strange, on reflection,

Given Benedict’s Abbey

Was pulverized so swiftly,

For one of the bombers’ crew

To imagine an abbey

Surviving Armageddon.

What happened once won’t happen

Ever again and never

Can be unhappened. Abbeys,

Bombings, battles, salvations—

Everything ever happened

Happened that once it happened.