by Tom Kuhn
It under his coat so nobody saw.
And there stood the maid with a bundle of straw:
Don’t waste any and it should do
To stop up the cracks the draughts blow through.
And cows will warm a room if they
Puff out deep breaths, so people say.
The light was poor at first but soon
Through a hole in the roof in came the moon.
Quite cosy really. Well there you are,
The world did that for Jesus. Could not do more.
True, out of the cranny . . .
True, out of the cranny far away
All comfort came. One sat there behind smoke
Whose voice came from that cover every day
But one noon that voice also ceased to speak.
But the cities packed with meat . . .
But the cities packed with meat for six lifetimes
And stocked with drink and with metal for the cups
Unperturbed they ate the meat and casually drank the water.
But wine, the abundant wine
Was driven by gigantic pumps
Up through pipes from fields at the foot
Sheer to the crowns of the cities and thus
In frightful detours unstoppably conducted
Into the wrong bellies.
And thus the meat was squandered on eaters
Three hundred murdered coolies report to the Comintern
Wire from London: 300 coolies taken prisoner by the Chinese White Army and being transported in open railway trucks to Ping Chuen have died of cold and hunger on the journey.
We should have liked to stay in our villages
But they could not leave us there in peace.
So one night we were herded into the trucks and alas
We could not get ourselves another ration of rice.
We could not ride in the closed trucks because
These were needed for the cattle who feel the cold.
Especially because our furs had been taken from us
And the wind coming horizontal, we suffered a great deal.
We asked several times what they proposed doing with us
But the soldiers who were our guards did not know.
They said if we blew in our hands we should not freeze.
We never did learn where we were going to.
The last night we halted outside the gates of a fortress.
We asked when we would arrive. Today, we were told.
It was the third day. That evening we froze.
For the poor people in these years it is too cold.
Last hope
1
Come evening, still no amelioration
Morning is spent and likewise our midday
Alas, have we not watered down our ocean
That was a noble thing once, they now say?
2
Yes, soon we shall have lost what face we had
Are speechless, not for want of gob or arse
This land no longer thinks we’re any good
And the cities of this land are still not ours
3
No man’s not glad of a roof over his head
Live free, it’s right and proper that we do
The daybreak drunk meets misery, it is said
Oh we are strange to one another through and through
The song of Surabaya-Johnny
1
I was young, God, I was just sixteen
You came up from Burma in the night
And you said I should be your woman
You would always be treating me right.
I asked what you did for a living
And you said as you looked straight at me
You’d a job or something with the railroad
And you’d nothing to do with the sea.
You talked a lot, Johnny
A lot of lies, Johnny
From the very first day, Johnny, you were nothing but a cheat
I hate you so, Johnny
As you stand there grinning, Johnny
Take that pipe out of your mouth, you rat.
Surabaya-Johnny, why must you be such a cad?
Surabaya-Johnny, oh God and I love you so bad.
Surabaya-Johnny, ah why should I be sad?
You have no heart, Johnny, and I love you so bad.
2
At first it was always Sundays
If I just went along with it all
But it didn’t last more than a fortnight
And the house of cards began to fall.
We were up and down through the Punjab
From the hills and right down to the sea:
When I look at myself in the mirror
I look like I’m forty-three.
It wasn’t love, Johnny
You were after cash, Johnny
But it was just your lips, Johnny, I was staring at.
You wanted it all, Johnny
And I gave you more, Johnny
Take that pipe out of your mouth, you rat.
Surabaya-Johnny, why must you be such a cad?
Surabaya-Johnny, oh God and I love you so bad.
Surabaya-Johnny, ah why should I be sad?
You have no heart, Johnny, and I love you so bad.
3
I hadn’t the wit to wonder
How you’d come by that particular name
But all along the coastline
You had a certain sort of fame.
So one morning in our tuppenny lodgings
I’ll be listening to the crash of the sea
You’ll be off with no explanations
And your boat will be down at the quay.
You have no heart, Johnny
You are nothing but a heel, Johnny
And now you’re leaving, Johnny, and how about that!
But I love you still, Johnny
Like the very first day, Johnny
Take that pipe out of your mouth, you rat.
Surabaya-Johnny, why must you be such a cad?
Surabaya-Johnny, oh God and I love you so bad.
Surabaya-Johnny, ah why should I be sad?
You have no heart, Johnny, and I love you so bad.
A thinking man soon knows . . .
1
A thinking man soon knows
Our greatness cannot last
The rain falls, the wind blows
And makes us small, fast
So allow a man to be
Small in his misery.
2
Do you see that black cloud there
(That’s a place for a man!)
In the moil, in the traffic-roar
Look around, stay cool
Take your hat and be gone
Where the traffic roars in the moil!
The city, the black-pox city
Full up with humankind
To wangle a meal here many
A man will change his mind.
On Nature’s complaisance
Oh yes the jug foaming with milk still comes
To the old man’s toothless and slobbering mouth also.
And around the knees of the fleeing killer
Still the dog fawns, for love from him too.
And over the man who behind the village abuses the child
Still the elms bow their leafy and beautiful shade.
And the blind friendly dust commends to our forgetting
The bloody trail of the homicide.
So too the wind, abetted by the rustling of leaves
Erases the screams of ships as they sink on inland seas
And courteously lifts the hem of the maid’s poor dress
Up her bonny legs, for the syphilitic stranger’s eyes.
And a woman’s deep and lascivious “You!” at night covers up
In the corner the four-year-old’s whimper of fear.
And into the hand that struck the child how winningly the apple
Pushes from the tree that cro
ps more abundantly year after year.
And the child’s clear eyes, how they shine when the father
Forces the heifer’s head to the ground and flashes the knife!
And the breasts of the women, where children once hung, how they heave
At the tread of boots through the village and the shrilling fife.
Oh, our mothers are for sale and our sons throw themselves away!
For the crew of a leaky boat any island in sight will do.
And all it cares in the world is this: that the dying man fights to be there
At dawn nonetheless still and thrice still to hear the cock crow.
Chorus of the Poor from The Rich Man and the Poor Man
The horror of being poor
Many have boasted they could bear it but
After a few years
Look at their faces.
Mouldering wallpaper and the smells of the privy
Bring the broad-chested men
Like bulls to their knees.
Watery vegetables
Destroy the plans that make a people strong.
Without water for a bath, without privacy and tobacco
You can’t ask anything of anyone.
Public disregard
Ruins the backbone.
The poor man
Is never alone. All are forever
Peering into his room. Their staring
Pierces his plate. He doesn’t know where to turn.
The sky is his roof, it lets in the rain on him.
The earth shakes him off. The wind
Slights him. The night leaves him crippled. The day
Strips him naked. The money a man has
Is nothing, it will not save him but
Nothing can help a man
Who has none.
The guest
Nightfall, but there’s much still she wants told
Quickly he spills out seven years, nigh on
And hears in the yard a chicken being killed
And knows the household only had that one
He will eat little of its flesh next day
Help yourself, she says. Still full, he answers her
Where were you yesterday before you came? —In safety
And where is it you’ve come from? —Town. Not far.
Then quickly he gets to his feet. Time flies!
Smiling he says to her: Farewell. —And you?
He hesitates, lets fall his hand, she sees
Dust on his shoes of streets she does not know.
The Gordian Knot
1
When the man from Macedonia
Had hacked through the knot
With his sword they called him
That evening in Gordium “Slave
Of his fame”.
For their knot was
One of the sparse wonders of the world
The work of art of a man whose brain—
The most tangled brain in the world!—had been unable
To leave anything behind as witness but
Twenty pieces of string entangled for the purpose
Of being in the end disentangled by the lightest
Hand in the world! Lightest except for
The hand that tied them, oh the man
Whose hand had tied them wasn’t
Without a plan to untie them but
His crowded lifetime sufficed
Alas for only the one thing, the knotting.
One second was enough
To hack through it.
Of the man who cut through it
Many said
This was moreover his happiest stroke
The most opportune, the least harmful
The other, anonymous, had no need
To vouch with his name
For his work that was half a work
Like all divine works
But the fool who destroyed it
Was obliged as though by a higher command
To name his name and show himself to that zone of the earth
2
If that is what they said in Gordium, I say:
Not everything difficult is useful and
To rid the world of a question
An answer suffices less often than
A deed.
The cities
Under them are sewers.
In them is nothing. Above them is smoke.
We were in them. We enjoyed them.
We passed away quickly. And slowly they will pass away too.
Concerning the cities 2
Some move away, half a street
The wallpaper they leave behind them gets painted over
They are never seen again, they eat
A different bread, their women lie
Under different men and moan the same
On fresh mornings faces and washing
Hang at the same windows
As before
This Babylonian confusion of the words . . .
This Babylonian confusion of the words
Comes about because they are the language
Of people who are going under
And we no longer understand them because
There is no longer any use in understanding them
What use is there
In telling the dead how we might
Have lived better, don’t urge
The already cold to learn
What the world is like
Don’t argue
With a man behind whom
The gardeners are already waiting
Instead, be patient
Recently I wished
To intrigue you with the story
Of a wheat dealer in the city
Of Chicago, in the midst of my speech
My voice fled me
For suddenly
I had realized: what effort
It would cost me to tell this story
To those who are not yet born
But who will be born and will live
In wholly different times
And—oh, happy race!—will not
Be able to understand what a wheat dealer is
Of the sort we have now
And I began to explain it to them and in my mind
I heard myself speaking for seven years
And met with
Only a speechless shaking of the head among all
My unborn listeners
Then I realized that I
Was relating a thing
That a human being cannot understand
They said to me
You ought to have changed your houses or your food
Or yourselves, tell us, was there
No model for you, even if
Only in books of earlier times
No model, drawn or described
Of humanity, for it seems to us
What exercised you was something very base
Very easily alterable, by almost anyone
Able to be seen through as wrong, inhuman and a one-off thing
Was there no such ancient
Simple plan by which
You could have conducted yourselves in your confusion?
I answered: there were plans
But, see, they were overwritten
With new signs, five rewritings, illegible
Five times the model was altered in our own
Depraved image so that in these accounts
Even our fathers
Only looked like us
At this their spirits fell and they dismissed me
With the vague sympathy
Of happy people
Tamburlaine, so I hear . . .
2
Tamburlaine, so I hear, went to the trouble of conquering the world.
I do not understand him:
With a little schnapps you can forget the world.
Of course, I don’t say a word against Alexander
But
I have seen people
; Who were very remarkable
And extremely deserving of your admiration
Quite simply
For being alive.
Great men sweat too much.
I see in all of it proof
That they were incapable of being alone
Smoking
Drinking
Etc.
And they must be such wretched creatures
They could never be content
To sit with a woman.
We ask that he too show his naked body . . .
We ask that he too show his naked body
That he will feel the silence, put away
The gloves, rope, sponge and bucket and that he
Will climb down wordless from the ring at full midday
Go where you please, only go there faster
This way or that, your exit is useless
Eat from our plate whatever gives you pleasure
Or drink your sorrow from our glass
Seeing how inadequate . . .
1
Seeing how inadequate
My entire generation is
That (out of servile considerateness)
Has forgotten itself
So that even I myself
Could no longer be the recipient of any honour
It does seem to me necessary
That some
Should be honoured
Not on account of their powers of reason
But: because they are well regarded
Not for their build
But: because of their clothes
Not on their own account
But: on account of their parents
The simpler such a man might be
The easier it is to honour him
The more helpless he is
All the more brilliant is he
To whom honour is due
Who wants to be a soldier . . .
