Fates of the Expressionists by Michael Hofmann

Found in Selected Poems Michael Hofmann

The Kaiser was the first cousin of George V,
descended, as he was, from German George,
and unhappy Albert, the hard-working Saxon Elector.
- The relaxed, navy-cut beard of the one,
hysterical, bristling moustaches of the other ...
The Expressionists were Rupert Brooke's generation.

Their hold on life was weaker than a baby's.
Their deaths, at whatever age, were infant mortality - 
a bad joke in this century.  Suddenly become sleepy,
they dropped like flies, whimsical, sizzling,
ecstatic, from a hot light-bulb. Even before the War,
Georg Heym and a friend died in a skating accident.
From 1914, they died in battle and of disease -
or suicide like Trakl.  Drugs Alcohol Little Sister.
 One was a student at Oxford and died, weeks later,
on the other side ... Later, they ran from the Nazis.
Benjamin was turned back at the Spanish border -
his history of the streets of Paris unfinished -
deflected into an autistic suicide.  In 1938,
Odon von Horvath, author of naturalistic comedies,
was struck by a falling tree. In Paris
                                                     At the Time
my anthology was compiled, there were still a few left:
unexplained survivors,
                                  psychoanalysts in the New World.