The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht

by Tom Kuhn

  Who wants to be a soldier

  That man must have a gun

  And he must load it with powder

  And heavy lead, my son.

  Who wants to be a butcher—

  And what more do you want, my son?

  That man must hurt some creature

  That humans feed upon.

  Augsburg Sonnets

  And poems belonging with that collection

  Brecht spent much of the summer of 1925 in Augsburg, his hometown, and wrote to Helene Weigel: “As always when I’m orphaned and with nothing to do, I’ve been writing pornographic sonnets.” He had plenty to do in fact and was only intermittently “orphaned.” He intended the sonnets for a collection, added to them over the next year or so, and did begin to arrange them for private publication. But among many other and more urgent projects, this one was not carried through. Some of the sonnets may be what Brecht calls “pornographic,” but most, including these, are best understood under the caption of one of them: “On living badly.” As in The Reader for City Dwellers there is a deliberate, consequential, and sardonic trying out of a number of modes of alienated life to which, within the poems themselves, almost no objection is raised or alternative offered. Any such answering back must come from the reader. The artistry—consummate use of the sonnet form—is really an integral part of the whole essentially (if covertly) moral project. Here are examples of living badly—done beautifully, with a clear intelligence. That combination is itself shocking.

  AUGSBURG SONNETS

  Sonnet No. 1. On the shortage of wickedness

  Even as a child I was for wickedness

  Humanity lasts: with Tamburlaine

  It went the distance grinning like a clown

  And not a cut: all noise, harmless.

  What, after all, is your Tamburlaines’ legacy?

  A Pacific Ocean of milk for little orphans.

  And yet they get their bad deeds etched in bronze!

  They owe their fame to sketchy memory.

  In vain the human race has ogled for

  The man who would at last chop off its head.

  Where is this man? Oh the earth’s poor few

  Moments are long-healed scars. Yet more

  Three or four Tamburlaines could not do:

  No final spurt, too tired, they dropped down dead.

  Sonnet No. 5. Cow eating

  She sways her broad chest at the wooden crib

  And eats. See now: chewing up a tuft of hay!

  For a while the stalks poke sharp between her lips

  She chews them carefully, so none goes astray.

  Her heavy body; old and mournful eyes;

  Used to bad things, she pauses while she chews

  And has for many years, raising her brows—

  Spoil her day, that would be no surprise!

  And while she’s still provisioning herself with hay

  Someone is taking milk from her. Without a murmur

  She allows his hands to tug her teats:

  She knows those hands. Doesn’t even look his way.

  Doesn’t wish to know what’s being done to her.

  She makes the most of the evening mood and shits.

  Sonnet No. 6. A man gets himself to bed

  While light still lingers he reads the newspaper

  But he’s already in his nightshirt by that hour.

  Quite soon it’s certain he’ll stand at the sink and peer

  Into the bowl: is anything floating there?

  Into this bowl he sticks his head and dries

  After a close examination of the towel, it on the unused corner

  Then shuffles blinking to the wall and widening his eyes

  He rips that day’s page off the calendar.

  He tamps tobacco in a pipe with his fat thumb

  Clacks shut his yellowish teeth against the stem

  Pisses quite absently into a pot

  He locks then in a box, lights the tobacco

  And suddenly notices he can see nothing now

  Climbs quickly into bed, pulls out his cock.

  Sonnet No. 7. An old whore

  While our mothers were giving birth to us

  The fathers lay down with the thing we came upon

  Behind the stove, bloated, who was

  All awash still with the seed of men.

  Over a little glass of green Chartreuse

  Dunking an end of bread, for a little money

  With those abraded sunken lips of hers

  She told us tales of inhumanity.

  But I have seen her watching by me like a mother

  So that I’d vomit with less pain

  And laughed, myself, a raucous laugh, when I heard of her.

  Soon I’ll be hooking dogs with this cunt of mine.

  She herself foresaw herself a dismal future:

  Against old age and usage art is vain.

  Sonnet No. 10. On the need for make-up

  Women who hide their parts as one might hide

  A rotten fish from the eyes of everybody

  And at the table show their faces nude

  So that their gentlemen may lick them publicly

  They give their bodies fast to him whose pass

  Over their breasts was rough and casual

  Closing their eyes, against the wall

  Shuddering they do not see which man it was.

  How unlike her who, with unspeaking eyes

  And lightly painted mouth, waves from the window

  To any, even a dog, going his ways

  How little her face weighed on the light of day!

  And yet how courteous she was of whom I say

  She must have died: she wears no make-up now.

  Sonnet No. 11. Concerning the enjoyment of married men

  I love my women in their faithlessness:

  They see me fix their fannies with a stare

  And must conceal from me how full they are

  (Oh I love watching how they manage this!)

  Still in her mouth the taste of the other man

  She’s forced to summon up the lust in me

  With that same mouth smiling lasciviously

  And warm up where his was with mine again!

  And while I’m deedlessly observing her

  Eating what of her lust she has left over

  She suffocates the sex-sleep in her breast

  Writing those lines I was still full of it!

  (But should my sweethearts ever read this sonnet

  It will have been a costly sort of lust.)

  Sonnet No. 12. The lover

  Let us concede: the flesh is weak, alas

  Since I enjoyed my friend’s wife, I vacate

  My room all day, sleep badly, in the night

  I notice I am listening for noises.

  The reason is my room is next to theirs

  And that’s what enervates me, that I hear

  Whenever he’s using her and if I hear

  Nothing, I think: so much the worse.

  Evening, we’re drinking wine, and when

  I notice that my friend won’t smoke a cigarette

  And that, when he looks at her, his eyes sweat

  I’m driven to fill her glass to overflowing

  Force her, if she says no, to drink so then

  In the night she need not notice anything.

  Sonnet No. 14. Inner emptiness

  When in the markets I heard them saying of me

  I was a man of inner emptiness

  I said at once: that’s what I’d like to be

  I did not say it just to make them furious.

  Nor did I say it just because it might be new.

  I’m empty, so I’m hungry, so I tarry:

  My lunch still lowing, I’m dreaming already

  I’ll shit the beef that’s eating hay right now.

  I must have room in me, then I’m not full!

  It is my urgent hope I’ll never eat my fill

  And
there’s another thing I’m scheming at:

  I must be flat, so I’ll outlive them one and all!

  How’ll I get flatter? There’s no herd of cattle

  Squashes the blank penny: it is flat.

  Sonnet No. 15. On the use of vulgar words

  I, immoderate and living moderately

  Allow me, friends, that I admonish you

  For scattering coarse words around the way you do

  As if they were in plentiful supply.

  Words, when fucking, may increase our lust:

  That it’s called fucking makes the fucker joyful.

  Who overuses that word, for example

  Deserves a mattress with the springs all bust.

  To me pure-minded fuckers are anathema.

  If now and then a woman lets go: so what?

  The sea’s high tide won’t wash the tree’s muck off.

  And the mind! Let nobody try cleansing that.

  The art of men is: fuck and think together.

  (Their luxury, however, is: to laugh.)

  Sonnet No. 1

  In memory of Josef Klein, guillotined in Augsburg Prison 2 July 1927 for robbery and murder

  I dedicate this sonnet to Herr Josef Klein

  And can do no more for him because they cut

  His head off early this morning. Which they did so that

  We’ll know the world won’t end by one bad deed alone.

  They did this to a creature of blood and bone

  While he rode on a wooden board strapped flat

  (A priest gave him a bit of Holy Writ

  Knowing that no God would look out for Klein.)

  But there’s too much of this, if you ask me.

  I’d much prefer such things did not occur

  For truly of their bad deeds there is no end.

  I should not like to be seen in their company

  (Or only until the money they owe me for

  This sonnet is safely in my hand).

  Sonnet No. 2. Models

  For years in search of who might be my model

  Not that I sought for a good man someone better

  I am not good, but do not think that shameful

  I found no one in life or literature.

  Most I sought insensibility but where

  I found a man who never lost his cool

  In a harsh world, he had no ears to hear.

  If he never lost his heart, he was a fool.

  Only those who had no water shed no tears

  (Hunger I saw feeding on a stone!)

  And I found no one happy—only: “It could be worse.”

  In the end, it seemed to me, precisely those

  Who might have been more to me than I myself had been

  Avoided precisely me (they knew me, I suppose).

  Sonnet No. 10. On modesty in a woman

  I don’t like it when women are dilatory

  The kind I like, coming insatiable

  And swiftly stilled, expire their fleeting modesty

  Without a pause between thirst and refusal.

  The act of love must transform her—do more:

  Deform her quite! Mixing their bodies

  Let the men’s heads and the women’s be as far

  Apart as though they were in different countries.

  Too modest to lay her hands upon a man

  And too libidinous to forgo all her fun

  The woman should measure hers to his libido.

  Too amiable not to put up with waiting

  Too insatiable ever to say no

  She is allowed the act of self-forgetting.

  POEMS BELONGING WITH THE AUGSBURG SONNETS

  Sonnet on living badly

  For seven years I’ve sat and broken bread

  With baseness and with malice knee to knee

  And so he’ll not turn our scant water bad

  I say to Envy, I’m not drinking, let it be.

  I eat my pleasure from the common dish

  And from the common cup I sup my sorrow

  I know you wish for more. I say, Tomorrow.

  Sooner, friend, you can’t have what you wish.

  Such conversation will not mend the soul.

  Behind the locker I breathed into my fist

  And smelled my breath: my breath smelled foul

  And then I told myself, Soon you will die.

  I’ve noticed since without much interest

  How slowly our small lot of time goes by.

  Discovery about a young woman

  A morning’s partings, and about to go my way

  A woman in the doorway, casually observed

  And then I saw: one strand in her hair was grey

  And found I could not bring myself to leave.

  Mutely I reached out for her breast, and when

  She asked me why—pointing at last night’s bed—

  I would not go, for that had been the plan

  I looked her straight in the eye and said:

  Even for one more night, I want to stay

  But you must use your time; for that’s the worst

  A woman on the threshold there like you

  And let’s be quicker with the things we say

  We had not thought that you were so far through.

  And then desire rose and choked my words.

  Need for art

  The virtuous woman who gives her lover all

  And offers up herself to him quite freely

  Must learn that good intentions are not really

  Quite enough—he’s also crying out for skill.

  And even if her cry of “Iamyours”

  Translates to sex with breakneck quickness

  He isn’t only interested in slickness

  When it comes to emptying his swollen balls.

  Although it may be love that stokes the fire

  She’ll need, for winters in these harsher years

  Some real talent in that bum of hers.

  More needful than a soulful gaze and sighs

  (Although she’ll need them too) are eager thighs

  Performing tricks with gusto and desire.

  Sonnet for drinkers

  We tenderize our meat before we eat it

  Likewise to enjoy our bodies fittingly

  Some preparation will be necessary

  (Take schnapps and let it trickle through the palate)

  The human head is mostly constipated

  And from the bowels is under constant stress

  “Not suffering is a man’s idea of bliss”—

  Achieved when he has self-decapitated

  The drinker thinks it worthy of a man

  To treat his head the way he does his dick

  It is the bitter milk taught him this trick

  Disappointment is the eater’s expectation

  Not till he shits does he feel safe again

  Want nothing at all, that is your best option.

  Sonnet: The winner

  Where there was no room for an olive tree’s shadow

  An unstoppable fighting among men began

  All for a little patch of ground where nothing grew

  Not even big enough to lay their corpses on

  But one fought there quite without any cause

  Like nothing in his violence, cursed by all

  And when the slaughterers thought of flight at nightfall

  He stood there fighting still, in no hurry to pause

  Most men were dead by then and lying there

  But he stood mowing everything around

  Till nothing but him stood and he had won

  When he left, the light was bad. Nevertheless I saw

  His back and on his back he had a wound

  He’ll never lie upon his back again

  Sonnet Number 3

  According to a medieval legend six Italian virgins, wishing to get to the Promised Land, sold their bodies to the ship’s crew. None reached Palestine.

  We’re like that woman who t
o reach the Promised Land

  Allowed the crew her body, for that price

  Hoping she’d sail into Paradise

  With ten salt sailor-cocks in either hand.

  We do the same. On such uncertainty

  We soil the body, the only one we’ve got

  And like the woman, to make it without spot

  Again we’d need the whole of a winter sea.

  So we arrive after many an enterprise

  On shore to give God a surprise.

  Yes, we turn up and halt on His left hand:

  Well, well, here come my troublemakers. These

  Will never be washed clean, not by all my seas.

  Against me in the witness box they take their stand.

  Sonnet on a fair-to-middling copulation