The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht

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The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht Page 28

by Tom Kuhn


  To wash under my dirty spout.

  One let his lads ride on me

  Very young, comrades already.

  True, before long they were gone

  Gone forever, but not forgotten

  Because I knew they felt for me

  We know we belong together

  Each my comrade, each my brother

  In the proletariat

  In the proletariat

  Them and me!

  The first I had was a man from Hamm

  He copped it on the Chemin des Dames.

  My second swallowed too much coal dust

  Blacked his lungs and he was lost.

  Soot in his eyes so he couldn’t see

  I squashed my third’s foot under me.

  My fourth one morning didn’t turn in

  It was a machine gun did for him.

  True, before long you’ll be gone

  Gone forever, but not forgotten.

  Because I know you felt for me.

  We knew we belonged together

  Each my comrade, each my brother

  In the proletariat

  In the proletariat

  You and me!

  Song of the machines

  1

  Hallo, we want to speak to America

  Speak across the Atlantic Ocean to the big cities

  Of America, hallo

  We wondered what language

  We should speak in

  To be understood

  But now we have gathered together our singers

  Who are understood here and in America

  And all over the world

  Hallo, listen to what our black stars are singing

  Hallo, take notice of who is singing for us . . .

  This isn’t the wind in the plane tree, friend

  This isn’t a song to the lonely star

  It is the wild din of our daily labour

  We curse it and we hold it dear

  This wild din is the voice of our cities

  And it pleases us to sing this song

  For this is the language we all understand

  And soon it will be the world’s mother tongue

  2

  Hallo, these are our black stars

  They don’t sing sweet but they sing while they work

  While they’re making light for you, they sing

  While they’re making newspapers, clothes and water pipes

  Trains and lamps, stoves and records

  They sing

  Hallo, sing us another song, will you, while you’re here

  A little song across the Atlantic Ocean

  In your voices that everyone understands

  This isn’t the wind in the plane tree, friend

  This isn’t a song to the lonely star

  It is the wild din of our daily labour

  We curse it and we hold it dear

  This wild din is the voice of our cities

  And it pleases us to sing this song

  For this is the language we all understand

  And soon it will be the world’s mother-tongue

  Children’s song

  1

  Bite, grabber, bite

  Coal has its price all right

  The coal is commandeered already

  The millionaire wants yet more money

  We sweat here day and night

  Bite, grabber, bite

  2

  Our pain, his gain, you bet

  The coal sups our sweat

  If I spend too long having a crap

  At once the price of coal goes up

  Young and old, we get

  Water for our sweat.

  Roll of honour for twelve world champions

  This is the history of the middleweight world champions

  Their fights and careers

  From the year 1891

  Till now:

  I begin the series in the year 1891

  The age of brutal fighting

  When the matches still lasted 56 and 70 rounds

  And only ended in a knock-out

  With Bob Fitzsimmons, the father of boxing technique

  World champion in the middleweight

  And in the heavyweight (by his victory 17 March 1897

  Over Jim Corbett)

  34 years of his life in the ring, only six times beaten

  So feared that for the whole of 1898

  He had no opponent. Not till 1914

  At the age of 51 did he fight

  His last two fights.

  A man without age.—

  In 1905 Bob Fitzsimmons lost his title to

  Jack O’Brien, known as Philadelphia Jack.

  Jack O’Brien began his boxing career

  At the age of 18

  He fought more than 200 fights.

  Never

  Did Philadelphia Jack

  Ask about the purse

  His standpoint was

  You learn by fighting

  And he won so long as he learned.

  Jack O’Brien’s successor was

  Stanley Ketchel

  Made famous by four sluggings

  Against Billy Papke

  And as the roughest fighter of all times

  Shot in the back at the age of 23

  On a smiling autumn day

  Sitting outside his ranch

  Unbeaten.

  I continue my series with

  Billy Papke

  The first genius of in-fighting

  In his day for the first time was heard

  The name: human fighting machine.

  In 1913 in Paris

  He was beaten

  By one greater in the art of in-fighting:

  Frank Klaus.

  Frank Klaus, his successor, met

  The most famous middleweights of his time

  Jimmy Gardener, Billy Berger

  Willie Lewis and Jack Dillon

  And Georges Carpentier was as weak as a child against him.

  He was beaten by George Chip

  The unknown man from Oklahoma

  Who otherwise did no deeds of importance

  And lost to

  Al McCoy, the worst of all middleweight champions

  Only good at taking punishment

  Who was shorn of his title by

  Mike O’Dowd

  The man with the iron chin

  Beaten by

  Johnny Wilson

  Who knocked out 48 men

  And was knocked out himself

  By

  Harry Greb, the human windmill

  Of all boxers the one you could always count on

  Who never refused a fight

  And fought every one to a finish

  And when he had lost said:

  I have lost.

  Sparring with Tiger Jack Dempsey

  The Man Killer, the Manassa Mauler

  Harry Greb drove him so mad

  He flung his gloves away

  The “phantom who couldn’t stand still”

  Beaten on points in 1926 by

  Tiger Flowers, negro and preacher

  Who was never knocked out.

  Today the middleweight world champion

  Successor to the boxing preacher is

  Mickey Walker

  Who 30 June 1927 in London in 30 minutes

  Thumped the bravest boxer in Europe

  The Scot Tommy Milligan

  To pieces.

  Bob Fitzsimmons

  Jack O’Brien

  Stanley Ketchel

  Billy Papke

  Frank Klaus

  George Chip

  Al McCoy

  Mike O’Dowd

  Johnny Wilson

  Harry Greb

  Tiger Flowers

  Mickey Walker—

  These are the names of twelve men

  Who in their field were the best in their day

  As was settled by hard fighting

  Observing the rules of the game


  Before the eyes of the world.

  The thrift of the rich

  Once hereabouts was a poor man.

  He came to the big houses

  And played the piano accordion

  Under their balconies

  And waited in vain for a rain of pennies.

  Paler every day his face.

  He was not nice to listen to.

  But he never hated the human race

  Despite what he went through

  Till he was the colour of dough.

  For now all his drink was the rain that fell

  And all his meat was the sun.

  (Diogenes in the barrel

  Was a Croesus in comparison)

  But he played the sweetest melodies still.

  When he finally croaked (of hunger)

  They opened the accordion

  And stretched it wider and longer

  And laid the old man in

  Which saved them the cost of a coffin.

  Winter

  Spring, summer and autumn, as I told you, are nothing to the cities, but winter is noticeable.

  1

  For winter

  By poets long called “the soft, the quiet season”

  Has again become terrible

  As in the beginning

  In theperiod

  Was not even the summer unfriendly?

  2

  Suddenly even the indifferent heavens

  Join in the destruction

  And arrive with the cold

  3

  The masses after their tribulation

  Returning find their cave dwellings dark

  4

  And from now on

  Hunger and cold divide up between them

  The stock of the poor.

  5

  As though human beings themselves did not suffice

  To exterminate their race.

  Fatzer chorus 1

  Also we saw driving through

  Our city too fast and so

  Scarcely visible

  With a blood-smeared face on urgent business

  Justice

  All too well protected by people

  With iron hats.

  Hearing a voice between

  Field gun and wolf

  We enquired and learned: that is

  The voice of justice.

  Fatzer chorus 7

  1

  Injustice is human

  But more humane

  The struggle against injustice!

  But even in this

  Halt at the human being, leave him

  Not used up, teach him,

  Killed, nothing more.

  Knife, don’t scrape off

  The script with the dirt

  You’ll have left

  Only an empty sheet

  Once covered with scars.

  2

  Such a clean sheet

  Covered with scars let us finally

  Insert into the record

  Of humankind.

  No sooner had he finished speaking . . .

  No sooner had he finished speaking

  He felt by a sudden cold

  Eleven shadows above him:

  Towards him in his exhaustion

  Came in a monstrous procession

  Eleven years of extreme misfortune

  Which would end

  Only with his utter destruction

  Singing Steyr motor cars

  We hail

  From a munitions factory

  Our little brother is

  The Mannlicher carbine.

  But our mother

  Is an ore mine in Steyr.

  We have:

  Six cylinders and thirty horsepower.

  We weigh:

  Twenty-two hundredweight.

  Our wheelbase measures

  Three metres.

  Each rear wheel moves separately: we have

  A pivot axle.

  We stick to the bends like glue strip.

  Our engine is:

  Thinking metal.

  Man, just drive us!!

  We will carry you with so little upset

  That you’ll think you’re floating

  In water.

  We will drive you so gently along

  That you’ll think you’d have to

  Press us to the ground with your thumb, and

  So quietly will we carry you

  That you’ll think you’re driving

  Your motor’s shadow.

  The tenth sonnet

  The world loves me or not, it is all one.

  Since I’ve lived here some talk has come my way

  And I keep every cowardly option open.

  The lack of greatness irks me though, I must say.

  Were there a table and great men at a meal

  I’d sit down gladly as the lowest of the low

  And should there be a fish I’d eat the fish’s tail

  And if they didn’t want my company I’d go.

  Oh for a book that told of such a table!

  And were there justice though none given me

  I should rejoice, even were I culpable.

  Is all this there and only I can’t see?

  I do not like to admit this: I of all people

  Despise the sort whose lives are miserable.

  However, if you want my opinion, gentlemen . . .

  I know all about all that

  It’s a mockery, gentlemen

  Virtue, love and good health

  And the stupidest: rewards in heaven

  Pie in the sky, jam tomorrow

  And the good it does now? Not a lot.

  The question is: who eats who?

  Answer that, and you know what’s what

  A man needs an appetite

  And pronto something to eat

  The leaves of every tree . . .

  The leaves of every tree

  Door, wall and windowpane

  We take possession of

  Now, as she dies, for her.

  Work and a place to live

  The world’s food and drink

  We take possession of.

  Rosa

  The bushes, blossoming yellow, stood

  Still full of hope, for sure

  And every flower held its head

  High, one week more.

  Epitaph 1919

  So now Red Rosa has also passed away.

  Where she lies none can say.

  She told the truth to the poor, that’s why

  The rich decided she had to die.

  The rag-and-bone man

  I am glad, God summoned Death

  And appointed Death to look after all who are weary of life.

  When all the wheels of a clock are worn and slow and its trains all loose

  And the clock goes on ticking and telling the time wrong from hour to hour

  And everyone in the house makes fun of it, what a clapped-out clock it is

  Then how glad the clock is when the big rag-and-bone man pushes his cart

  Up to the house and embraces the clock and says:

  I like hearing the tally of my rights . . .

  I like hearing the tally of my rights

  It is my right

  To have enough to eat

  (It is not my right to have my food taken off me)

  One of my rights

  Is to sleep with a roof over my head

  But are there as many roofs

  As there are rights?

  It is my right

  To get justice

  To be invited

  And not turn up

  To wear a good suit

  To wear a bad one

  To borrow money

  To get my arse kicked

  To tell them the truth

  To hear the truth

  In addition and above all

  I surely have the right to live

  Don’t I?

  Even as a child they said it was disgraceful .
. .

  Even as a boy they said it was disgraceful

  That a woman’s bum uplifted me

  Say what they like: I’m human, I am natural

  Women tempt me as they always have. Praise be!

  And even if they stirred my better urges

  And the soul in me struggled towards the light

  And even if my prick stayed in my trousers

  My face is still a very unchaste sight.

  Men are only stopgaps but a woman

  Takes what falls into her lap, so it is said

  But cupping up a bosom’s much more fun than

  Being well respected when you’re dead

  Inscription on an uncollected tombstone

  Traveller, should you pass by

  Know this:

  I was happy

  My undertakings were fruitful

  My friends were loyal

  My thoughts agreeable

  What I did, I did for a reason

  At the end I did not recant

  Never for anything trivial

  Did I alter my opinion.

  Since I am not yet dead

  All I dare say is this:

  My life was hard, but

  I am not complaining

  Also I have things to show for my life

  Don’t worry about me, I myself

  Despise unhappy people

  But even as I wrote

  What you are reading here

  By then nothing could touch me.

 

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