by Tom Kuhn
In the ninefold depths of his pond, does he know
That the foxes are robbing him and eating his piglets
Or does he not know?
A protest in the sixth year of Ch’ien Fu
Of the hills and the plains and their rivers
You have made a battlefield.
How, do you suppose, will the people living there
Provide themselves with firewood and hay?
And don’t give me the twaddle
About titles and appointments.
The reputation of a single general means
Ten thousand corpses.
On the birth of his son
Families when a child is born to them
Wish it intelligent.
I who through intelligence
Have entirely ruined my life
Can only hope my son
Will turn out ignorant and too idle to think.
Then he will have a quiet life
As a cabinet minister.
Address to a dead soldier of Marshal Chiang Kai-shek
The march into the four winds
Is over for you. Now you lie
Between four planks of pine.
Thanks to the very great generosity of your corporal
You are still wearing
Your very thin shirt.
The corporal took a long spade.
The sergeant reached for a gun.
Four comrades lifted you up.
Their faces are sullen
Though you weigh very little:
Skin and bone.
When the platoon is outside town
The sergeant loads his rifle
And the corporal hands the bearers the spade.
And the corporal sits on the slope
He is thinking of hawking your rice rations.
It will give him meat and brandy.
And the sergeant on the other side of the slope
Levels his rifle.
But the four, sweating
Dig a hole your length in the ground.
And they commend the man of the Seventh Platoon
Who was flung without ceremony into the river
So that he would drift away by himself, unaided.
And so you lie here, comrades to right and left
Comrades under you and soon enough
Comrades above you too and in a few weeks
The wind and the rain will disinter your bones and you
Who waited for freedom your short lives long
And had no wish to lie here, friends
The wild dogs will come and they
Will carry you away from here.
Thoughts whilst flying over the Great Wall
Below me a vista of the northern landscape.
Ten thousand miles of winged snow.
Motionless
The Yellow River, from this height
No longer a torrent. Between it and us
Clusters of cloud, white and crimson, delicate as breaths.
Pasture and tillage on both sides
Of the Great Wall. How many suitors
Have bowed low before them!
All the paltry
Kings of the Ch’in and the Han
Who knew little.
The Tang and the Sung, abundantly frivolous!
And the arrogant
Only son of a dynasty, Genghis Khan
Even he
Could do no more than draw a bow.
All came to grief.
But even today
Consider the great rulers: still
The bad old cupidity.
Resignation
Don’t think ahead: if you’ve no luck
You’ll shudder a long while yet
And don’t, for heaven’s sake, look back
Memory is regret.
Better you sit day in day out
Like a sack in your armchair
And better you lie in your bed at night
Like a stone and never stir.
Feeding time: open wide!
Sleep time: shut your eyes!
Squat in your coach: nag hauls, you ride.
Good for something, I suppose.
Keep your thoughts away from everything . . .
Keep your thoughts away from everything that is over and done with
For thinking of the past excites regret.
Keep your thoughts away from everything that is coming or may not be coming
For thinking of the future excites unease.
Better you sit all day like a sack in your chair
Better you lie at night in your bed like a stone.
When food comes: open your mouth
When sleep comes: close your eyes.
The hat, presented to the poet by Li Chien
Long ago, then a white-haired gentleman
You made me a present of a black crepe hat.
The crepe hat still sits on my head
But you have already gone to the NETHER SPRINGS.
The thing is old but still presentable
The man has gone and will not return.
Out on the hill the moon is shining tonight
And over your grave the branches sway in the autumn wind.
The Chancellor’s gravel drive
A government ox yoked to a government cart
And moored fast to the bank of the Ch’an River a barge heaped full with gravel.
How many pounds
One load of gravel weighs!
They transport gravel at dawn
They transport gravel at dusk
Why are they transporting so much gravel?
They are transporting it to the Five Gates
West of the highway.
There in the shade of green laurels they are making a gravel drive.
For yesterday the land’s
Newly appointed Chancellor arrived
And he was very concerned that the wet and the dirt
Might soil his horse’s hooves.
The hooves of the Chancellor’s horse
Trod on the gravel
And remained perfectly clean.
The ox dragging the cart
Sweated blood.
It is the Assistant Chancellor’s job
“To be helpful to people, to govern the land
And to balance Yin and Yang.”
He cannot allow himself to care
That the ox’s neck is red raw.
Hollywood Elegies
Brecht lived in Santa Monica from August 1941. At first he tried to sell film stories in Hollywood, but soon came to a very negative assessment of the place. Hanns Eisler, who joined him soon afterwards, suggested: “Here is the classical location where you’d have to write elegies.” And so they did. Eisler set most of these pieces to music almost as soon as they were written. Later he put them together with other Brecht settings in the Hollywood Songbook. There are several different orderings and numberings, none of which is final, and Eisler’s settings are sometimes of slightly different wordings.
The village of Hollywood is designed according to the image
People have round here of heaven. Here
They’ve worked out that God
Needing both heaven and hell, had no need
To lay out two separate establishments, but
Just the one, namely heaven. It
Serves the needy and unfortunate
As their hell.
By the sea, the oil derricks. In the canyons
The bleached bones of the gold prospectors. Their sons
Built the dream factories of Hollywood.
The four cities
Are filled with the oily reek
Of films.
The angels of Los Angeles
Are tired out from smiling. In the evening
Behind the fruit market, desperate
They buy little bottles
With the smells of sex.
Beneath the green pepper trees
The street
-walker musicians solicit, two by two
With the writers. Bach
Has a four-part perversion in his clutchbag, Dante swings
His scrawny ass.
The city is named after the angels
And you meet them everywhere, angels.
They stink of oil and wear golden pessaries
And with blue rings around their eyes
They spend their mornings feeding the writers in their stagnant ponds.
Every morning, to earn my bread
I go to the market where lies are traded
In hope
I take my place amongst the sellers.
The town of Hollywood has taught me this
Paradise and hell
Can be one city: for those without means
This paradise is hell.
In the hills there’s gold
At the coast they’ve found oil.
Greater fortunes come from the dreams of happiness
That the people here inscribe on celluloid.
Above the four cities they circle
The warplanes of the Ministry of Defence, at a great height
So that the stench of greed and misery
May not reach them.
Uncollected Poems 1943–1945
These poems now take us, slowly and painfully, through to the end of the war, Brecht still uncomfortable in the mercantile world of the United States. There are blessed moments when he can think and write of something other than man’s inhumanity to man.
I, the survivor
Of course I know: it is only chance
That I have outlived so many friends. But last night in a dream
I heard these friends say of me: “It is the strongest who survive”
And I hated myself.
The rain falls down from up above . . .
The rain falls down from up above
It isn’t really news
And the victors are always the other ones
And we are the ones that lose.
They said: no plane will ever reach
To Essen or Berlin
And now our cities are quaking
The furniture is shaking
And we can’t see out or in.
They said in just three weeks
Russia will be overcome
And now our armies go
Through firestorm and snow
And find no way back home.
They said: we can do it
Against the whole wide world
Our Führer is a fool
And the really stupid thing:
He’s met with people even dumber
He’s wound them round his little finger
And leads them on a string.
Aurora
Aurora, you who swim the lovely stream
In which no man a second time can step:
Trembling at your lippy kisses, as in a dream
The maiden at once and nobly rose up.
The great and now transfigured maiden went
Laughing back to her homestead where she told
How she awaking from uneasy sleep
Had seen the red of dawn against the flow.
This blush of light came suddenly, she said
Still night: it came so quick and scarlet-tinged.
And then to indicate that wondrous red
Unbound her scarf and waved it in the wind.
Landscape of exile
But I too on the last boat
Saw the gay red of early dawn in the boat’s tackle
And the pale grey bodies of dolphins leaping
From the Sea of Japan.
The little horse-drawn carriages with their gilded fittings
And the pink armbands of the matrons
In the alleyways of raddled Manila
These the refugee was glad to see.
The oil derricks and thirsting gardens of Los Angeles
And California’s evening canyons and the fruit markets
These too did not leave this messenger of misfortune
Cold.
On watering the garden
Oh watering the garden, to bring on the green!
Give water to the thirsty trees! Give more than enough and
Do not forget the shrubs, even
Those that bear no berries, the jaded, the
Niggardly. And don’t overlook
Between the flowers the weeds, they too
Are thirsty. Nor yet sprinkle only
The fresh lawn or the parched, but
The bare earth also, refresh that too.
German Miserere
One fine day our bosses gave the order
To conquer little Danzig over the border.
In tanks and bombers Poland was overrun
In just three weeks the job was done.
God preserve us.
One fine day our bosses gave the order
To conquer France and Norway, over the border.
We fell upon Norway and France was overrun
In five weeks of the second year the job was done.
God preserve us.
One fine day our bosses gave the order
To take Greece, Serbia and Russia, over distant borders.
We rode into Russia, Serbia and Greece
And for two long years we’ve been fighting for our lives.
One fine day they’ll give the order—maybe soon—
To take the depths of the oceans and the mountains of the moon.
But in Russia we’re fighting for our lives now every day
The enemy is strong, the winter cold, and home so far away.
God preserve us, and lead us back home again.
Homecoming
And how will I find you, town where I was born?
Following the swarms of bombers
I am coming home.
Where is my town? Where the monstrous
Mountains of smoke stand.
That in the fires there
That is my town.
How am I likely to be received in my hometown?
The bombers arrive ahead of me. Lethal swarms
Announce the son’s return. Infernos
Are my harbingers.
When the Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann granted the Americans and English the right to chastise the German people for ten long years for the crimes of the Hitler regime
1
Chastise the chastised, go on!
Chastise him in the name of the demon!
Chastise him in the name of the spirit!
Hands folded in his scrawny lap
The fugitive demands the death of half a million people.
For their victims he demands
Ten years’ punishment. The sufferers
Shall be chastised.
The prize-winner demanded of the cross-bearer
That he fall on his armed tormentors with bare hands.
From the press came no response. Now
Insulted, he demands the castigation
Of the crucified.
2
In order to win a hundred-thousand-dollar name
To the cause of the martyred nation
The scribe pulled on his best suit
And bowing low
Approached the holder of that name.
To seduce him with polished words
That he make some gracious remark about the people
To buy him over with flattery
To perform a good deed
Cunningly to project the idea
That honesty pays.
Warily the luminary listened.
For a moment
In order here too to be celebrated, he considered the possibility:
Write this, my friend, I consider it my duty
To do something for the people. Hurriedly
The scribe inscribed the precious words, hungry
For more he looked up, and saw only the back
Of the eminence in the doorway. The attempt
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br /> Had failed.
3
And for a moment
The supplicant was confused
For churlishness
Troubled him wherever he encountered it.
But then, mindful
That this shameless human being
Lived from his shamelessness, but that the people
Find only death if they lose their shame
He walked away in peace.
Embarrassing incident
When one of my most revered deities observed his 10,000th birthday
I came with my friends and pupils in order to celebrate him
And they danced and sang for him, and recited his works.
The mood was emotional. The party was nearing its end.
Then the celebrated deity stepped onto the platform for the artists
And declared in a loud voice
In front of my sweating friends and pupils
That he had just suffered an epiphany and from now on
Had become religious, and with unseemly haste
And provocation, he put on a moth-eaten priest’s hat
Fell indecently to his knees and shamelessly
Began to intone a brazen hymn, thereby offending
The irreligious feelings of his listeners, amongst whom
