Paul Kane: The Genoa Grail

The Genoa Grail

“la memoria di tanta grazie”

—Cattedrale di San Lorenzo

I

9 February 1941: Genoa

Light flashing on the surface of the sea,

gentle green swells rising and falling away,

the promise of fair weather, are no guarantee

a sudden turn won’t change the day

back to alarms and thumping explosions,

the whistling of shells, the spray

of near misses, the witless emotions.

Force H steams back from Operation Grog

on high alert, going through motions

all but second nature by now in the smog

of war. The carrier and battleships withdraw,

the men at the big guns ready to slog

the intercepting fleet Supermarina—

Italy’s Naval High Command—sends out

to avenge the shelling of Genova.

It was a morning’s work, brought about

by the need to convince Franco

this was a conflict he’d best sit out.

In three days’ time, the Duce, Benito,

will meet the General at Bordighera

to bring Spain in against the Allies. A show

of force, thinks Churchill, on the Riviera

nearby will reveal how unprepared

Mussolini really is. And so Genoa,

with its shipyards and port, has again fared

poorly in this war, bearing the brutal brunt.

The calculation works: Gibraltar is spared.

And at what cost? In opening this front

the British leave unscathed, while the Genoese

suffer a gross of deaths and the affront

of ineffective response. The city seethes

with resentment as Maria José,

Princess of Piedmont, finds it on its knees.

II

17 May 1101: Caesarea

Of Caesarea, much has disappeared:

Roman palaces, the Christian library,

the city walls invaders would have feared,

standing before them at siege, wary

of what stands behind the slotted walls.

Vestiges remain. Time and sand will bury

most things and what—in the present—befalls

us is often what we dig up: the past.

The Pilate Stone, with its inscription, calls

to Christians the way the Minaret once did

to the faithful there in Palestine.

(All these layers of which we are never rid.)

Guglielmo Embriaco, whose design

for the towers that brings Jerusalem down

brings him fame from Tasso, and a name to enshrine

the deed, “mallet head”, takes the Muslim town

with Baldwin the First, who, in butchering

the populace, adds to his barbarous renown—

thus shall Crusaders remain the recurring

nightmare of Islam. After fifteen days

the city is ripe for sacking and, during

this plunder, the Genoese, in the craze

for spoils, enrich themselves beyond belief—

or not quite, for it is here that they raise

the ultimate relic, that chalice of grief—

the Sacro Catino, or Holy Grail—

the emerald green dish that becomes the chief

ornament of San Lorenzo when they sail

home to Genoa and Embriaco

enters in triumph, glorified by travail.

Napoleon will later take it to show

disdain for the other treasures, only

to break it, dealing the myth a shattering blow.

III

28 October 1998: London

To prolonged applause, Commander Henry Hatfield

stands down as Treasurer of the BAA,

his fellow astronomers, with unconcealed

delight and respect, eager to repay

services rendered with wit and aplomb—

his nine profitable years on display.

An amateur we’d call him, who had become

famous for his Photographic Lunar Atlas,

and infamous, too, for a single bomb.

A twenty-year-old midshipman whose progress

must have been rapid, suddenly thrust,

with little training, and under the stress

of combat, into a position of trust:

a Trainer on the HMS Malaya,

the naval gunner whose job is to adjust

the calculations of range to pitch and yaw.

At 8:14 firing began in heavy fog,

thirteen miles out from the port of Genoa.

Two salvos for range, then, says the log,

the third slams east of the docks near Polcévera.

(How did they gauge panic in Operation Grog?)

Hatfield corrects to the left for the error,

compounding it, for left is east, not west.

Later salvos blanket the city with terror,

but Hatfield’s salvo—to his own confessed

horror—hits the Cathedral San Lorenzo,

busting through the nave—a bullet in the city’s chest.

The searing armor-piercing shell, meant to blow

up steel-clad ships, fails to explode on impact—

the ancient masonry too “soft”—and so

the Church survives, with all its loot from the sack

of Holy Lands. “Miraculous,” thinks Hatfield,

who becomes a devout Roman Catholic.

Coda

25 September 2013: Genoa

It stands near the main entrance, in the south aisle

(not the sort of icon one would expect)

a shell five feet tall, a lone sentinel

to remind us of miracles and the wreck

of war—as if Genoa needs reminding.

It’s not the original shell, some suspect,

since newspapers reported how the thing

was defused, removed and dumped into the sea.

But a British shell it is, and when bells ring

out in the Cathedral tower—key of C

# major—does the shell secretly sound,

along with the restored glass Grail, in sympathy?

Paul Kane