The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht
Page 6
—The man himself was dead soon after
Five centuries since have been and went
Yet no one ever did discover
If anything came of his lament!
4
So I, before old age takes hold
Dims my sight and stops my mirth
Teaches me humility and, when I’m cold
Gently pushes me under the earth,
With no particular addressee
I’ll hurl into the winds once more
Not meekly, nor on bended knee
The following refusal to concur.
Songs for the Guitar by Bert Brecht and His Friends
The poems (and their tunes) spring from the shared experience and inspiration of the so-called “Brecht Clique”—himself and half a dozen young men and their varying girlfriends. But he was the acknowledged prime-mover, he wrote out the poems and sketched the music in a notebook, as his first collection, although it was not published as such in his lifetime. Much here in a nutshell will grow into the Domestic Breviary.
Baal’s song
If I find a well-stacked woman, then I take her in the hay,
Air her knickers, skirts and so on, in the breeze—for that’s my way.
If she bites me in flagrante, then I wipe her down with hay,
Mouth and teeth and crotch, gallantly: nice and clean—for that’s my way.
If the wench gets in a fever of excitement at our play,
I salute and laugh and leave her, friendlily—for that’s my way.
Song of the tired rebels
It’s true the shoes that never trod
Will show no wear and tear.
And whoever was never tired or sad
Was never a dancer either.
And when of old age, nothing more
It goes to dust, your shoe
Made for kicking, as you were
Had a happier life than you.
We never jigged with greater grace
Than we did over the graves.
God pipes his sweetest party piece
Only when the hearse arrives.
Little song
1
Now once there was a man
Aged eighteen he began
Drinking—and so begun
By drink he was undone.
He died in his eighty-first year
What of, is crystal clear.
2
And once there was a child
And he died one year old
Far too soon—just begun
By that he was undone.
He never drank—that’s clear
And only lived a year.
3
So you will see from this
How harmless drinking is . . .
Song of the gallows-tree birds
So your bad bread won’t give us bellyache
We wash it down with your no better wine—
So that we shan’t, too early, choke and croak.
Besides, we’ll be awful thirsty one day soon.
For your bad wines, keep your Communion:
We leave it you without rancour, generously . . .
Sins we do have, worries we have none.
You, for your part, have morality.
We cram our bellies fatter with good stuff
That has cost you much sweat and many tears.
Often we have our mouths too full to laugh
Too full of kyrie eleisons you have yours.
And when between heaven and earth we’re hanging there
Like fruit or bells or storks or Jesus Christ
Please fold your empty little paws in prayer
To your Father, who does not exist.
What bliss it is to lay your women out!
Slyly you settle up the shameful score . . .
How blissfully they let us lay them out
And then run after us in clink for more.
We’re lighter with the young high-breasted wives
Than are the lawful men whose rings they wear.
They love the lad who leaving their bed thieves
Some flimsy thing the husband forked out for.
They lift their eyes to heaven and their skirts
Behind to the needed height. Any clown or lout
Coming on with bare-faced cheek enough soon starts
Their tongues up after the apple in his throat.
The cream of your milk tastes not so bad, you know
Especially since it’s you who foots the bill.
We dip the ladle in your pail for you
So you can drown in skimmed milk if you will . . .
So what if we never made it through Heaven’s door?
In the end your world wasn’t quite our cup of tea.
O bent-backed brother, can you look up at us up here?
We are free, brother, we are free!
A bitter love song
Let things be now as they will
She was once very dear to me
So I know this also: once
She must have been very beautiful.
But now I no longer know how she looked then
One day extinguished what for seven months shone.
A song for the gentlemen on Ward D
The flames of love, oh how they burned in you
When you were young and full of fire!
The human man-kind bangs the woman-kind black and blue.
That’s that: it’s the way they are.
Song of love
Side by side sat Heider Hei with Tine Tippe in the grass
The bright sun shone on them
And Hei asked Tine, No or yes?
And she laughed at him!
Oh how she laughed at him.
The youth and the maiden
(Chastity ballad in a major key)
Oh they were melting into one!
He was feeling: she is mine.
And the darkness egged them on.
She was feeling: we’re alone.
And he kissed her forehead for
She was not a bad girl nor
Did she want to cross that line.
Oh their hands’ delicious playing!
Oh her heart went clippity-clop!
He is praying, she is praying
That he’ll stir her courage up.
And she kissed his forehead for
She was not a bad girl nor
Knew what point or if to stop . . .
So as not to desecrate her
Now he visited a whore
Learned the festivals of Nature
And the art of spewing there.
Dipping in her body he
Washed away unchastity
Swore himself chaste evermore.
She however to put out
The guiltless fire he had lit
Attached herself to one without
Scruple who was fit for it.
He was rough, he laid her out
On the stairs, hard. And yet
Oh the grip of him was bliss!
She was not a nun and this
Stirred in her the taste for it.
And he praised his brain that had
Directed him the clever way
When he kissed her on the forehead
In the joyous month of May.
She the bad girl, he the dickhead
Branded on their brows they read:
It’s a mucky game we play.
Psalms
These poems, almost all of them bearing as the whole or a part of their titles the word “Psalm,” were written in or around 1920, most of them into one notebook and with very little correction. Brecht felt freer in the form. He noted in his diary (August 31, 1920): “I must write some more psalms. Rhyming holds me up too much.” The psalms anticipate the Domestic Breviary by annexing a traditional Judeo-Christian form for a new purpose in a new voice. In writing them Brecht also had the—more congenial—example of Walt Whitman, whose celebrations of life and love in the here and
now were most typically in psalmic style. First translated in 1855, Whitman was appearing again in German around 1920 in translations by, for example, Hans Reisiger and Max Hayek.
Vision in white. 1st Psalm
At nights I wake drenched in sweat coughing and choking. My bedroom isn’t big enough. It is full of archangels.
I know: I have loved too much. I have filled too many bodies, consumed too many orange skies. I’m for the chop.
The white bodies, the softest of them, have stolen my warmth. They got fat on me. Now I am freezing. They tuck me in under so much bedding I suffocate.
My suspicion is: they will try to fumigate me with incense. My bedroom is inundated with holy water. They say I’ve got dropsy, they say I am swollen up with holy water. And it will kill me.
My lovers bring me bits of lime in their hands that I have kissed. The bill arrives for the orange skies, the bodies and the rest. I can’t pay.
I’d rather die. —I lean back. I close my eyes. The archangels clap.
Hubris. 2nd Psalm
My trousers smell shamelessly of love. I’ve stopped washing: I swim in the young persons’ pool face down.
Every now and then my guardian angel tries to pull me out of the water by the hair. Then I lose hair like a dog in November. But even bald-headed I stay in the water.
Often he pumps my head full of air, to make me surface. But I fasten my teeth in the weed, for heads are unreliable.
Don’t hand me a monstrance, I’m forever choking on the host. But hand me eggs and cocoa for my soul hungers and thirsts after these. So it goes.
Freight. 3rd Psalm
I have heard that loving gives you a sore throat. Which I don’t want. But I have heard that swing-boats give you a sore throat too. So there’s no avoiding it.
The red sheets you wrap yourself and the swing in, clap; the rods of the great boats creak, being obliged to mount; I compare them to beasts tearing at the bridle, but the rider sits tight. The rider has sucked fast like a bloodthirsty tick, an abominable polyp, he clutches onto the fat crimson beast and rides at heaven where cloths will catch him. The yellow lamps gawp upwards, how high we go and still the whole thing does not fall apart.
Riding the swing-boats. 4th Psalm
Thrust out your knees like a sovereign whore as though it were knees you hung from. Very big knees. And plunging scarlet to your death in the naked heavens, flying arse first and then the front face first, up and up. We are completely naked, the wind feels through our clothes. This is how we were born.
The music never stops. The angels blow till Pan’s little round dance almost falls asunder. We fly into heaven, we fly over the earth, sister air, sister, brother wind. Time passes, music never.
The swings close at eleven. Then it is God’s turn.
Song from the aquarium. 5th Psalm
I drained the cup to the dregs. For I was seduced.
I was a child and they loved me.
The world despaired of me, for I stayed pure. She rolled on the ground in front of me, her limbs were soft, her hinderparts very alluring. I did not weaken.
But to hush the world when she went too far I lay down with her and became impure.
Sin satisfied me. Philosophy helped me at dawn when I lay awake. And so I became as they wished me to be.
For a long time I looked upwards and believed that heaven was sad on my account. But I saw that I meant nothing to him. He loved himself.
I drowned a long time ago. I lie grossly on the bottom. Fish inhabit me. The sea is draining away.
6th Psalm
I’m a band in Chicago. Niggers with cigar stumps between their front teeth drum on the benches and slap the fat soles of their feet on the spittled boards. I play the Marseillaise.
I’m a butcher’s slab in Nizhny Novgorod. Young men, red and bellowing, buy my meat and devour it in the sun. In the evening when the meat’s all gone I feel easier.
I’m a sunken ship on the seabed. An electric eel inhabits me, that one day a Dutchman will eat, and a few bloated lumps of humanity sweating with arrogance and swimming in their shirts. I have machines, and the place where I do my cooking sings when the fish come clattering through. I’m tired of lying on my left side.
I’m a snowy peak in the Himalayas, a high-altitude health resort. I’m wondering what I’m here on earth for.
The seventh psalm
1
My beloveds, I know it: my hair is falling out with this wild living and I must lay me down on the stones. You see me drinking the cheapest schnapps and I go naked in the wind.
2
But, my beloveds, once upon a time I was pure.
3
I had a woman, she was stronger than me as the grass is stronger than the bull. The grass lifts up again.
4
She saw that I was bad and she loved me.
5
She did not ask where the way led that was her way and perhaps it led downwards. When she gave me her body she said: That is all. And it became my body.
6
Now she is not anywhere anymore, she vanished like the cloud when it has rained, I let her go and she fell, for that was her way.
7
But at night sometimes when you see me drinking I see her face white in the wind and strong and turned my way, and I bow into the wind.
Song of my mother. 8th Psalm
1
I no longer remember her face as it was before she had pain. Wearily she brushed her black hair off her forehead which had diminished. I can still see her hand doing it.
2
She had been threatened by twenty winters, her sufferings were legion, in her presence death was ashamed. Then she died and we found the body of a child.
3
She grew up in the forest.
4
She died among faces that had watched her dying for too long and had grown hard in it. We forgave her for suffering but among these faces she wandered hither and thither until she collapsed.
5
Many go from us without our holding them. We said everything to them, there was nothing left between them and us, our faces were hard when we said goodbye. But we did not say the important things, we were economical with what was necessary.
6
Oh why do we not say the important things, it would be so easy and we shall be damned for it. They were easy words, right behind our teeth, these were the words that fell out when we laughed and we choke on them.
7
Now my mother has died, yesterday, towards evening, 1 May! We can’t scratch her out with our fingernails.
Heh. 9th Psalm
1
Hear me, friends, I sing you the song of Heh, the dark-skinned, my beloved for more than sixteen months until her dissolution.
2
She did not grow old, she had undiscriminating hands, she sold her skin for a cup of tea and herself for a whip. She ran among the willows till she was tired, Heh!
3
She offered herself like a fruit but was not accepted. Many had her in their mouths and spat her out, the good woman, Heh. The beloved, Heh.
4
In her head she knew what a woman is but not with her knees. With her eyes in daylight she knew the way but in the dark she did not know it.
5
In the night she was wretched, blind with vanity, Heh, and women are nocturnal creatures and she was not.
6
She was not wise like Bi, the lovable, Bi, the plant, she ran hither and thither and her heart was unthinking.
7
And for that reason she died in the fifth month of year 20, a quick and secret death when nobody was looking, and vanished like a cloud of which people say: it never was.
10th Psalm
1
For sure: I am mad. I shan’t last much longer. But for now I have gone mad.
2
When I sink, there are still women, white, with lifted arms, palms together.
3
I drug myself with music, with the bitter absinthe of the small musics of the low quarters, with electric organs, it leaves coffee grounds in me, I know. But it is my last distraction.
4
I read the last letters of great men and steal the most effective gestures from the brown Arab drapers at their stalls. But I do all that only in the meantime.
5
. . . . . . . . .
The eleventh psalm
1
Evenings by the river in the dark heart of the bushes sometimes I see her face again, hers, the woman I loved, my woman, dead now.
2
It is many years ago and at times I know nothing about her anymore who was once all things to me but all things pass.
3
And she was in me like a small juniper on the Mongolian steppes, concave with a washed-out yellow sky and great sadness.
4
Our dwelling place was a black hut by the river. Often and grievously the horseflies bit her white body. I read the newspaper seven times, or I said: Your hair is the colour of dirt. Or: You are heartless.