The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht

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The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht Page 67

by Tom Kuhn


  There were, what is more, some young people too.

  For three days

  I have not dared show myself

  To my friends and pupils, I am

  So ashamed.

  The song of the Moldau

  The times they are changing. The boundless ambitions

  Of powerful men will stutter and fail

  Like bloody cockerels they strut their positions

  The times they’re a-changing, there is no avail.

  Down under the Moldau the stones are a-rolling

  Three kaisers lie buried in Prague, so they say

  The great won’t stay great, nor the lowly stay lowly

  The night has twelve hours, but then comes the day.

  One time among many times . . .

  One time among many times

  Fate forgets the fortunate

  The poison letter doesn’t come

  Murder is unaccountably delayed

  As if in a cloud of golden glitter

  The lovers pass away their days.

  But perhaps fate is all-knowing

  Wishes but to show an irresolute hand and

  Tentatively adds seven happy years, and then

  Undecided

  Takes two away again.

  The condemnation of classical ideals

  Dignity weighed with fraudulent weights!

  Who’s left standing, old man, as you float past?

  Imperial togas in elegant pleats

  Who tore off the label that told us the cost?

  O insensible grandeur of ages long gone

  Uncomplaining submission to avoidable pain

  O statues of patience hewn from the stone

  O belief in inevitable sin and blame!

  Why on earth call them who govern your fate

  Your “gods”? What good did that do?

  O placid composure, half-witted restraint

  In the face of all done both by and to you.

  You who would not cry out at abuses

  You who turned your back on feasting and games

  You who understood yet made your excuses

  You who just stood there and sang in the flames

  And you who wouldn’t fight, O don’t be mistaken

  You who let life be cheated from you

  The death sentence that has already been spoken

  Will get our signature too.

  Night in Nyborg . . .

  Night in Nyborg in the sloop

  The Finnish marshes, early light

  Newspapers and onion soup

  New York, Fifty-Seventh Street

  In Paris for the Congress

  Svendborg and Vallensbæk

  London in the fog and wetness

  The Annie Johnson on the deck

  A tent amongst the birches

  In Marlebäck’s grey dawn

  The flag of actor-workers

  In Copenhagen’s ancient town!

  Workroom

  The copper pots you gave me

  The Confucius (on the wall)

  The light table

  The manuscript cupboard

  The high desk

  The tin basin.

  You are very present and you are missed.

  The fisherman’s tool

  In my room, on the whitewashed wall

  Hangs a short bamboo cane, wound with string

  With an iron hook, fashioned

  To gather fishing nets out of the water. The cane

  Was acquired at a junk shop in downtown. My son

  Gave me it for my birthday. It is worn.

  In the saltwater the rust of the hook has penetrated the hemp binding.

  These traces of use and of work

  Confer on the cane great dignity. I

  Like to think, this fishing tool

  Was left me by the Japanese fishermen

  Driven out from the West Coast and into camps

  As suspect foreigners, and then installed in my place

  To remind me of certain

  Unsolved, but not insoluble

  Questions of humanity.

  The new sweat cloth

  When the great man came, bleeding

  And to blame for having suffered it

  Stepping out from serfdom and walking into serfdom

  There stepped up to him a fat man, shaking his head and

  Smelling a bit of Indian musk

  And he drew from his swollen breast pocket a piece of paper

  And handed it, in full view of the people, to the bleeding man

  And there, in front of the applauding multitude

  The bleeding man patiently wiped

  The sweat from his brow, and the fat man

  Took back the paper on which

  Now the countenance of the bleeding man was imprinted

  Waved it to the crowd

  And sent it off

  To the mint.

  The voluntary watch

  By way of my literary works

  I have won myself some voluntary watchmen

  Who watch over me in this city of buying and selling.

  Expensive houses and houses with a more exotic aspect

  Are closed to me. Some people

  I am only permitted to see if I can demonstrate that I have

  Business with them. Inviting them to my table

  Is forbidden. When I talked about the purchase of a nicely carved table

  I was met only with laughter. If I wanted to buy a pair of trousers

  I would certainly hear: Haven’t you got some already?

  So they watch over me in this town

  So as to be able to say, they know a man

  Who is not for sale.

  The discontents who acted . . .

  The discontents who acted, your great teachers

  Devised the construction of a body politic

  In which man was no longer a wolf unto man.

  And discovered mankind’s fancy for eating his fill and living in the dry

  And his desire to manage his affairs for himself.

  They didn’t believe the prattle of priests

  That the terrible hunger would be sated only when our bellies have rotted.

  They threw out the bowls of meagre fare.

  They recognized the man branded the enemy

  As in fact their hungry neighbour.

  They were patient only in their struggle against the oppressors

  Accommodating only towards those who would not endure exploitation

  Tired only of injustice.

  He who hurled away the stool on which he sat so ill

  He who pushed the plough an inch deeper than anyone before him

  Let him, the discontent, be our teacher

  In rebuilding the body politic.

  Those, however

  Who declare themselves satisfied by a plate full of promises

  Let their bellies be ripped out.

  To cover their twisted bones

  A spoonful of sand would be a waste.

  Long before

  Long before we mowed the wheatfields of the Ukraine

  We were hungry for the wheat of the Uckermark.

  And we thirsted for the wine of the Mosel slopes

  Long before we drove our tanks into blossoming Champagne.

  Long before we reduced the mothers of Kiev to tears

  We saw our own mothers weeping, and long before

  We fell upon the fishermen of distant Norway

  At home with us a man was a wolf unto men.

  Long before over our heads the enemy bombers appeared

  Our cities were already unlivable in. The ancient detritus

  Could not be swilled out simply

  By a new drainage system.

  Long before we were killed in aimless slaughter

  —Still we wandered aimlessly through the cities that still stood—

  Our women already were widows, the children our orphans.

  Marked generations
r />   Long before over our heads the bombers appeared

  Our cities were already

  Unlivable in. The detritus

  Could not be swilled out by any

  Drainage system.

  Long before we fell in aimless slaughter

  Walking through the cities that then still stood

  Our women were already

  Widows to us and the children our orphans.

  Long before we were cast by those, marked like us, into pits

  We were friendless. What the lime

  Ate away were no longer faces.

  City landscape

  1

  Oh you, fished from sardine tins

  Singular once more, as your mothers dreamt you

  Poised between plate and lip, once again

  With your strange eyes, perhaps even an eyebrow of your own

  Dripping with the oil of reassurance and comfort

  That keeps you fresh, squashed a bit flat

  With creases, oh you bookkeepers, it is you

  I seek out, the prized contents

  Of the cities!

  2

  From the gutter water

  They still pan gold.

  The great one they discharge

  Over the rooftops, smoke

  Makes off on its own.

  3

  In the yard there’s washing pegged out: a woman’s

  Pink drawers, the wind

  Gusts into them.

  4

  The city sleeps. It gobbles down

  Its sleep in urgent hunger. Gurgling

  It lies in the gutter, haunted

  By indecent dreams and

  Anxiety about the next meal.

  5

  The streams of people

  Wash over the business districts

  Which in the night were cleansed

  Of the dirt and ravages of the people streams

  From the day before.

  6

  Amongst the dirty streams of people

  Lapping against the sides of the buildings

  Sheets of newspaper come floating.

  Swill around the monuments and

  Climb into the office blocks.

  7

  The nine peoples of the city sleep

  Exhausted

  By their vices and the vices of others.

  Their tools

  Lie out ready for tomorrow’s work. Through the empty streets

  The watchmen’s boots ring out.

  On a field far away

  Lifting ponderously into the air:

  The bomber planes.

  I saw twenty-year-olds . . .

  I saw twenty-year-olds like gods

  Generous, unstudied and beautiful

  But seeing the thirty-year-olds

  I had a shuddering sense of what they do on Manhattan

  With gods.

  Your deeds will not be approved . . .

  Your deeds will not be approved because they are yours

  Rather you will be approved if and so long as they are good.

  He who has often failed cannot demand

  That his suggestions are considered, but he who has not failed

  Cannot demand that they are not considered.

  Think also that trust

  Is exhausted by the fact of demanding it.

  New epochs

  New epochs do not begin all at once.

  My grandfather already lived in the new age

  My grandson will doubtless still live in the old.

  New meat is eaten from old forks.

  It was not the automotive vehicles

  Nor the tanks

  It was not the aeroplanes over our roofs

  Nor the bombers.

  From the new antennae came the old stupidities.

  And wisdom was passed from mouth to mouth.

  Metamorphosis of the gods

  The ancient heathen gods—this is a little-known secret—

  Were the first to convert to Christianity.

  Through the grey oak groves they went, in broad daylight

  Mumbling popular prayers and crossing themselves.

  Throughout the Middle Ages they went and stood

  As if absent-mindedly, in the stone niches of churches

  Everywhere where there was a call for godly figures.

  And at the time of the French Revolution

  They were the first to put on the gilded masks of pure reason

  And, power-hungry notions

  They strode, old blood-suckers and thought-gaggers

  Over the bent backs of the toiling masses.

  In the early hours of the new day . . .

  In the early hours of the new day, in the half-light

  The vultures will rise up in great swarms

  From distant shores

  In silent flight

  In the name of order.

  On bourgeois belief

  The one man is rich the other poor

  And no one can see why that should be, for

  There are rich idiots, and the wise

  Cannot see where to lay their heads out of the rain.

  So, as it is clearly not a question of deserts

  There must be a god

  Who disposes as he thinks good.

  What is a banknote, a scrap of paper

  Of no weight, and yet

  It is health and warmth, love and security.

  Does it not have some spiritual quality?

  It is something godly.

  Why do the hungry go down into the coal mines?

  They carry picks and hammers in their hands

  And yet the well-to-do walk amongst them come Saturday afternoon

  Without fear.

  God protect them.

  But above all: death!

  So our lives are taken from us

  But why do we let ourselves be robbed?

  We have always received something in exchange that we lived

  Should we have nothing for our death?

  God grants us a better life.

  We drove, we six . . .

  We drove, we six, through Libya’s desert night

  Our tank was new, that of our enemy newer.

  We gave the bloody Tommies hell all right

  All six of us, we met our deaths in fire.

  The play is over . . .

  The play is over. The production done. Slowly

  The theatre, a flaccid gut, is emptied out. In the cloakrooms

  The dapper salesmen wash off the paint and sweat

  The swiftly assembled mimicry, the rancid rhetoric. Finally

  The lights go out, the lights that disclosed

  That miserable patchwork, and leave in twilight

  The beautiful void of the misused stage. In the empty

  Auditorium, still slightly smelly, the good

  Playwright sits and, unsatisfied, tries

  To remember.

  Laughton’s belly

  They all drag their pot bellies

  Like illicit swag, as if they were wanted men

  But the great Laughton delivered his like a poem

  For his own edification and to no one’s disadvantage.

  There it hung: not unexpected, yet far from commonplace

  Built of good food, selected

  At leisure, as a pastime.

  According to plan, a good plan, admirably executed.

  Garden in progress

  High above the Pacific coast, with beneath it

  The quiet rumble of the waves and the rolling oil tankers

  Lies the actor’s garden.

  The white house is shaded by huge eucalyptus trees

  The dusty remnants of a mission long gone.

  Nothing else recalls it, except for the Indian

  Snake’s head of granite that lies by the fountain

  As if waiting patiently

  For the decline of any number of civilizations.

  And there on a wooden block
was a Mexican sculpture

  Of porous tuff stone, a child with malevolent eyes

  Standing in front of the bricks of toolshed.

  A fine grey bench of Chinese design, turned towards

  The toolshed. As you sit there, talking

  You can look over your shoulder to the lemon grove

  With ease.

  By some clandestine equilibrium

  The parts are both at rest and play, but nowhere

  Do they ever withdraw from our delighted gaze, and the masterful hand

  Of the ever-present gardener prohibits any part

  From too great a uniformity: the fuchsias for example

  May host the odd cactus. And the seasons continually

  Reorder the prospect, so that now here, now there

  Some group will blossom or fade. A lifetime

  Would not suffice to take it all in. Yet

  As the garden grows with the plan

  So the plan grows with the garden.

  The powerful oaks on the lordly lawn

  Are plainly creatures of fantasy. The master of the garden

  Takes his sharp saw and

  Every year refashions the branchwork.

 

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