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
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.