Axis & Allies - damowords

Napoleonica
Come let us ramble on two hundred years
Now Maltese curse the grand Knights of Saint John,
Whose raison d’etre slowly disspaears,
The long decaying of the Ottoman;
Valetta’s chests
Bulging with Muslim gold,
While decadence infest their noble poise of old.
Upon his complex to the east
Napolen here pauses
Finds auberges spread like a feast
Of roci, exotic courses
& so upon Malta releas’d
All his hungry forces –
Maltese taking Libertie as a wife
The island fell without the loss of life.
Alas she was no bedfellow
Of our love romantic,
For blow by blow crude taxe grow
Sending men all frantic,
Pleas sailing to Lord Nelson patrolling the Atlantic.
Malta
1798
Rock of Empire
While Boney battl’d at Aboukir Bay
The English have enclosed Calypso’s Isles
Fierce ring preventing vessels, every day,
From provisioning the French rank & file;
Valetta’s walls
Immune to cannons’ shot,
But not those hungry holes which growling stoumachs knot.
To haples, “Vive Napoleon!”
The garrisons surrender,
Abandon’d on the hard ocean
To starve & scarlet fever,
Majestic London, from now on,
Malta’s first officer –
& even Mdina’s nobilty
Happy to join Britain’s community.
So in a skirl of pipe parades
Portsmouth has flagg’d the Med –
The vision fades… fourteen decades
Into time’s train are fed –
The grand digressionm over, let us fell the day instead.
Malta