The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht

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 . . .