by Tom Kuhn
And give the order: Fire! and end the suffering forever?
Song of the smoke
Once upon a time, before my hair turned grey
I thought I’d make it through if I was smart
But being smart is not enough, I see that now
That won’t fill a poor man’s belly or warm his heart.
So I said: forget it!
See how the smoke drifts, blue and grey
Into ever colder coldness: so too
You drift away.
Honest men I saw, hard-working, worked to the bone
And so I thought I’d choose the crooked way
But that too only leads our kind down and down
And now I’ve nothing left to say.
So just: forget it!
See how the smoke drifts, blue and grey
Into ever colder coldness: so too
You drift away.
The old, they say, have little left to hope in life
For time is what they need, and that gets less and less
But for us young, they say, the gate swings open wide
It leads, they say this too, to nothingness.
So let me say: forget it!
See how the smoke drifts, blue and grey
Into ever colder coldness: so too
You drift away.
When we came to Milano . . .
When we came to Milano
We wrote to the folks back home:
This war will soon be done.
The captain’s breathed his last
The field kitchen is lost
And the ammunition gone.
When the war had lasted full five years
There was no more word from the missus
That was no great surprise to me.
Often, when the wine was flowing
I saw her: she was sitting
On another man’s knee.
When we entered Milano
We set it alight from one end to the other
It burnt from dawn till late.
Seven days we held our tongue
Then took us women old and young
For our rage was very great.
For how long should she wait
When the bright nights come
And the winds of spring?
How long, I hear her saying, must I lie awake
Someone must come, and no mistake—
For women are a fleshly thing.
When we moved on from Milano
The campaign began again
And we’ll be staying in lands afar.
How many more whores will we wave to
How many kegs of wine be slave to
At least another three or four.
The people say . . .
The people say: a poor man needs good fortune.
The work of his hands brings in too little.
So that’s why God invented games of chance
And the dog racing. And God
In his endless solicitude for the poor
Gives the taxman, on occasion, a poor memory
Or makes the public prosecutor stumble over his words.
For a poor man needs good fortune.
When I am lying in my churchyard grave
When I am lying in my churchyard grave
My love will bring a handful of earth.
Say: Here lie the feet that came to me o’night
Here the arms that oft-times held me tight.
The terrifying doctrine and opinions of the Master Court Physicist Galileo Galilei, or A foretaste of the future
When the Almighty made the universe
He made the earth and next he made the sun
Then round the earth he bade the sun to turn.
That’s in the Bible,—Genesis Book One.
And since that time all beings here below
Were in obedient circles meant to go.
Around the pope the cardinals
Around the cardinals the bishops
Around the bishops the secretaries
Around the secretaries the aldermen
Around the aldermen the craftsmen
Around the craftsmen the servants
Around the servants the dogs, the chickens, and the beggars
Up stood the learned Galileo
Glanced briefly at the sun
And said, Almighty God was wrong in Genesis Book One.
And that is bold, my friends, this is no matter small
For heresies could spread at once like bad diseases
Change Holy Writ, forsooth, what will be left at all?
Why each of us would say and do just as he pleases.
Good people what will come to pass
If Galileo’s teaching spreads?
No altar boy will serve the mass
No servant girl will make the beds.
Now that is grave, my friends, this is no matter small
An independent spirit spreads like bad diseases.
For life is sweet, and man is weak and after all—
How good it is, just for a change, to do just as one pleases.
The carpenters take wood and build
Their houses not the church’s pews.
The member of the cobblers’ guild
Now boldly walks the streets in shoes.
The tenant kicks the noble lord
Right off his land—like that!
The milk, the wife once fed the priest
Now makes, at last, her children fat.
Now that is grave, my friends, this is no matter small
An independent spirit spreads like bad diseases
For life is sweet, and man is weak and after all—
How good it is, just for a change, to do just as once pleases.
The duchess washes her chemise
The emperor has to fetch his beer
His troops make love behind the trees
Commands they do not hear.
Now that I think of it, I feel
That I could also use a change;
You know, for me you have appeal . . .
Maybe tonight we could arrange . . .
No, no, no, no, no, no, stop, Galileo, stop!
An independent spirit spreads as do diseases!
People must keep their place, some down and some on top!
Still it feels good, just for a change to do just as one pleases!
Good creatures who have trouble here below
In serving cruel lords and gentle Jesus—
Who bids you turn the other cheek—just so!
While they get set to strike the second blow!
Obedience will never cure your woe:
Let each of us get wise and for once do just as he pleases!
The song of fraternization
Just seventeen I was
When the enemy came to town.
He offered me his arm
And laid his sabre down.
And after evensong
Came May nights warm and long
The regiment formed a square
The bugle sounded, they stood at ease
Then the enemy took us into the trees
And fraternized, right there.
The enemy were many
My enemy was a cook
I hated him by day
At night I loved the schnook.
For after evensong
Come May nights warm and long
The regiment forms its square
The bugle sounds, they stand at ease
Then the enemy takes us into the trees
And we fraternize, right there.
The love that so consumed me
Was truly a force from above.
My folks could never grasp
That I didn’t hate, just love.
One dank and dismal dawn
It turned to hurt and pain
The regiment formed the square
The bugle called, and with one accord
The enemy, and the man I adored<
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Marched off without a care.
Poems for Margarete Steffin, 1938–1941
Margarete Steffin died in the High Mountains Sanatorium in Moscow 4 June 1941. Brecht and his party continued to Vladivostok and across the Pacific to America without her. Arriving in Santa Monica, he wrote: “It is as though my guide has been taken from me just as I enter the wilderness.” That desolation, expressed directly in the poems lamenting her death, extends into much of his life and work in the new phase of exile.
The 21st sonnet
Hesitant, lifting the black receiver, so
Much fear was in me I had no delight
In the word ‘cured’. It was not till night
I vowed I’d send you a dream and a laudatio.
This is the dream: when you step into the daylight
Our guardian beasts shall bow their heads to you
And raise them trumpeting the respect you’re due
For such conspicuous valour in a mortal fight.
Praised be whoever won’t cast down the burden
That she was charged with though the ground give under her!
The greatest victory: the one that seemed beyond her!
The smallest whitest beast shall give you thanks for this
That you by courage and by canniness
Saved us the fighter and the good woman.
Sonnet
And now it’s war and now our way is tougher.
You fellow wayfarer, my given comrade
On level ways or steep, narrow or wide
Teacher and taught, both being both together
And both in flight now with a common goal
Know what I know: that this goal’s not more
Than the way itself, so should one of us fall
And the other let her, let him, only setting store
On the goal itself, the goal would disappear
Become unrecognizable, nowhere known
And breathless at the end the one arriving there
Would stand in sweat and a grey nothingness.
Here where we are now at this milestone
I ask the poem’s muse to tell you this.
Sonnet No. 19
One thing I do not want: you flee from me.
Complain, I’ll want to hear you anyway.
For were you deaf I should need what you say
And were you dumb I should need what you see
And blind: I’d want to see you nonetheless.
Given to watch for me, companion
The way is long and we’re not halfway done
Consider where we are still: in darkness.
“Leave me, I’m wounded” is not good enough
And nor is “Somewhere”, only “Here” will do.
Take longer with the task: but you can’t be let off.
You know, whoever’s needed is not free.
But come whatever may, I do need you.
I saying I could just as well say we.
Then at the last, when death . . .
Then at the last, when death, who is not implacable
Showed me the four ruined lobes of her lungs and shrugged
And could not ask it of her that she live on the fifth alone
Speedily I assembled another five hundred tasks
Things to be dealt with at once, next day, next year
In the next seven years
Asked countless questions, critical questions, only
Answerable by her and so in demand
She died more easily.
Now, oh fearing for our lives . . .
Now, oh fearing for our lives
Fleeing the hater whom we hate
We have launched ourselves upon
The waters of great ill repute.
Henceforth may typhoons be pleased
To scatter his battleships for us
So we’ll live on in his flesh
Unkillable and poisonous.
May the wicked fogs henceforth
Keep us hidden from his patrols
So, approaching, they won’t see
Us, the bacilli he hosts.
May we by the typhoons’ grace
Under the protection
Of hated banks of fog draw near
The shores that welcome strangers in.
Wreckage
There’s the wooden box still for the notes when a play is being constructed
There are the Bavarian knives, the lectern is still there
There is the blackboard, there are the wooden masks
There’s the little radio and the army trunk
There is the answer, but nobody asking the questions
High above the garden
Stands the Constellation of Steffin
Remembering my little teacher . . .
Remembering my little teacher
Her eyes, the blue angry fire
And her worn cloak with the wide hood
And the wide hem, I named
Orion in the sky the Constellation of Steffin.
Looking up and contemplating it, shaking my head
I believe I hear a faint coughing.
In the ninth year fleeing from Hitler . . .
In the ninth year fleeing from Hitler
Exhausted by the journeys
The cold and the hunger of Finland in winter
And waiting for the passport to another continent
Our comrade Steffin died
In the red city of Moscow.
My general has fallen . . .
My general has fallen
My soldier has fallen
My pupil has gone away
My teacher has gone away
The one who looked after me has gone
The one I looked after has gone
After the death of my collaborator M.S.
Since you died, little teacher
I go around not seeing, restless
In a grey world amazed
Without employment like a man dismissed.
I am denied
Admission to the workplace
Like any other stranger.
I see the streets and the public gardens
Now at unaccustomed times of the day and so
Scarcely recognize them.
Home
I cannot go: I am ashamed
That I am dismissed and in
Unhappiness.
Children’s Crusade 1939
War came into Poland
In 1939
And there was only a wasteland
Where house and home had been.
The armies took brother from sister
And man from wife. In the fire
And rubble the child sought the mother
And couldn’t find her anywhere.
Then nothing came out of Poland
No newspaper, no post
But a story, a strange story,
Circulates in the east.
In an eastern town snow was falling
When they told the story about
A children’s crusade and Poland
Was where it started out.
There were children trailing the long roads
In troops and passing through
The shot-to-pieces villages
Their hungry numbers grew.
They were trying to escape the battles
And all the nightmare
And one day come to a country
Where there’d be no more war.
They had a boy for a leader
He cheered them when they were low
But he was worried, he asked himself
Which way? And did not know.
A girl of eleven dragged along
A little lad of four
And to make him a good mother
All she wanted was no more war.
And on the march was a Jewish boy
With velvet at his throat
And he was used to white white bread
But he found his own two
feet.
And two little brothers, great strategists,
Marched in that campaign.
Stormed an empty shed but lost it
To the overwhelming rain.
And one lad sidled along apart
He was the thin grey one.
A terrible blame was eating him:
He came from a Nazi legation.
A musicmaker was with them, he found
A drum in a smashed-up store
But couldn’t play it, the rat-a-tat-tat
Would have told the world where they were.
They captured a dog
To kill and eat, they said
But hadn’t the heart to do it
So they fed him instead.
They opened a school, a little girl
Was writing the hard word FRIEND
(“I” before “E”) on a busted tank
And never reached the end.
And they did have a concert of music
By a winter stream that roared
And the drummer-boy was allowed to drum
Because he couldn’t be heard.
A girl of twelve, a boy of fifteen
They had a love affair.
In a house and home the guns had smashed
She combed his hair.
