by Tom Kuhn
Mother Courage, you’ve heard tell
’Twas in the Thirty Years’ War
She went out to buy and sell.
She wanted to make a profit
And had no fear of war
She took her three children along as well
So they’d make that little bit more.
Her first son died a hero
The second because he was true
Her daughter had a heart too good
And so they shot it through.
Uncle Eddie
Uncle Eddie has a moustache
The moustache, it has five hairs.
And so that he won’t lose one
All have names, of course.
Their names are Fritz and Otto
And Max and Carl and Paul.
Max is somewhat sickly
And Fritz a bit slothful.
We fly over the mountains . . .
1
We fly over the mountains
As though there were nothing to it
Great are the works of humans!
But bread for all? We can’t do it.
Child, ask why
Can we not feed the hungry.
2
Across continents
People speak from house to house
Hundreds of thousands
Of hands are reaching out.
Child, ask why
Do they not grasp fraternity.
And when the tree hung full of pears . . .
And when the tree hung full of pears
They were too heavy for the tree
Then the farmer came with a prop
And supported the branches.
And when the pears were in the cellar
He took the prop away
So that it wouldn’t rot.
And when the winter came with snow
It was too heavy for the tree.
The branches weren’t supported
And they broke off.
And when the summer came again
There were no pears at all.
“In summer I bring you pears
In winter I bring nothing
If you don’t help me in winter
In summer too I’ll bring nothing.”
The warlike schoolmaster
Old schoolmaster Huber
Pro-war, pro-war was he.
When he spoke of good King Fritz
His eyes blazed like the Blitz
But never when he spoke of Wilhelm Pieck.
Along came washerwoman Smithy
Anti-dirt, anti-dirt was she.
She picked master Huber up
And she put him in her tub
And washed him clean away.
Willem’s palace
Willem has a palace.
Niederschönhausen is its name.
Beautiful on the inside
And outside just the same.
Willem isn’t there.
He lives in his own place
And there he sees a friend or two
And has a breathing space.
And when the people wish
To see their President Willem
He comes into his palace
And he shakes hands with them.
To R.
A student now of emptiness
I’ve learned to fill myself anew
When I live with nothingness
I know at once what I must do.
When I love and when I feel
That just brings me wear and pain
Out, however, in the cold
I am hot again.
Weaknesses
You had none
I had one:
I loved.
On the Ruhr there’s a house in ruins . . .
On the Ruhr there’s a house in ruins
Misery cries through its broken panes
Out of the war there comes a son
Aged twenty, an old man.
Mother, father, brother dead
And the son can find no bread
Homecoming, he gives a cry
Everybody hears that cry:
For the son stands at the gates
Pounding, it reverberates
Loud and clear through the Ruhrland
At his back the people stand
Hearing it comes General Clay
Raging: Lock that man away!
So they took him but his cry
Had been heard by everybody.
On the Elbe there’s much land
On the left a big house stands
Here behind the windowpanes
Our son’s general sits and dines.
Cousins, officers and wives
Laughing, feasting, plan their lives
Shiver suddenly. And why?
All of them have heard the cry.
For the son stands at the gates
Pounding, it reverberates
Loud and clear through the Ruhrland
At his back the people stand
Hearing it comes General Clay
Raging: Lock that man away!
So they took him but his cry
Had been heard by everybody.
In the city of Tehran . . .
In the city of Tehran
On the throne of the kings
Sits a cloak of scarlet linen
Over it hovering
A golden hat. But
The rulers of the kingdom live in Taucis.
They are not anointed with balsam
They are anointed with petroleum.
Lovely . . .
Lovely
Is the satin smell of roses in a country garden
And the dear smell of sesame.
But what are they
Compared with the smell of oil?
And the smell of fresh white bread
Of peaches and pistachios
Is also good but as nothing
Compared with the smell of oil.
Though the smell of stallions
Camels and water buffalo
Is bliss to the connoisseur the one
Irresistible smell is oil.
Song of the gut-washer
Felicity lies in relieving
Those who were dealt a harder lot
Gladly, swiftly round you giving
What you have and they have not.
Oh their faces are more lovely,
When you give, than any rose.
Oh the joy when heavily
In their hands your giving weighs!
Such a thorough happiness
Springs from helping one and all!
Pleasure in what is mine, unless
I make it thine, will pall.
Around this table here . . .
Around this table here
Sat the hawk-eyed kings
With the one-eyed kings
And kept each other company. But now
They are all sitting in the dark and none is able
None is able to see.
The theatre of the new epoch . . .
The theatre of the new epoch
Was launched when, onto the stage
Amidst the ruins of Berlin
Rolled Mother Courage’s covered wagon.
One and a half years later
In the procession on the first of May
Mothers held their children up to see
Helene Weigel and they
Gave thanks for peace.
Tschaganak Bersijew, or The cultivation of millet
After G. Fisch’s ‘The man who achieved the impossible’
In the kolkhoz-peasant a type of worker unheard of in the agricultural history of any age and any people comes into being; a man who, armed with wondrous technical means, takes up the struggle against elemental forces and achieves influence over the natural world, inspired by the idea of changing it.
Ivan Mitschurin
1
Tschaganak Bersijew, the nomad
Son of the empty deserts in the la
nd of Kazakhstan
In the steppes by the Uil River rich in wormwood
There he settled, there his planting millet seed began.
2
Millet was the nomad’s cereal
Lover as it is of plots virgin and small
Doesn’t mind heat, needs little seedcorn saving—
Why shouldn’t it be millet after all?
3
True, it cried eternally for weeding till the people
Were on their knees and spat at it and cried:
“You’re fit for nothing only trampling!”
But Tschaganak Bersijew was on its side.
4
And he irrigated in this fashion:
Laboriously fixed a waterwheel and set
An ageing camel to tow a beam in circles round it
And cause the scooping buckets to water his small plot.
5
A thousand years the nomads had been wandering
When the Soviet powers stood at the Uil River and far and wide
A voice was heard, in all four quarters
That great voice was heard and “Halt!” it cried.
6
Earth and heaven had been there forever
And now the kolkhoz came. The days
Of “my field here” and “yours alongside mine” were over
And suddenly the fields were vast in size.
“The steppes by the Uil are old
The times are new.
Yesterday’s fire
Needs new wood now.”
7
Tschaganak Bersijew was fifty
When he joined the kolkhoz named “Kurman”
After the Bolshevik commissar Kurmanov
Who helped expel the beys from Kazakhstan.
“The steppes by the Uil are old
The times are new.
Yesterday’s fire
Needs new wood now.”
8
Tschaganak, overseer of irrigation
Driving his disgruntled camel round and round
Remembered something, something he had seen once
Years before, that brought oil out of the ground.
“The steppes by the Uil are old
The times are new.
Yesterday’s fire
Needs new wood now.”
9
And now, no hand at writing, he dictated
In the name of the kolkhoz a letter to the Soviet government
And a petrol-engine-driven pump was sent him
That watered a field six times the old extent.
“The steppes by the Uil are old
The times are new.
Yesterday’s fire
Needs new wood now.”
10
But when the time came round for watering
The old man followed his nose. The neighbours jeered:
“Job done! You’ve got a pump, we haven’t.”
All he said was “Oh”, and stroked his beard.
11
“You care about the time, I care about the millet.
It must be able to drink, and all it will
But not be always drinking when it wants to
So for a little while my pump stands still.”
12
“When should the millet drink then?” asked his neighbours.
He said: “I solved that question for it by a test.
I watered one field this way, that another
And then examined where it grew the best.”
As the land is now
It need not stay
Study, learn how
To shape it your way.
13
In the fields during the day he picked the earliest ears
And over them at home at night sat pondering.
Sorted the heaviest grains from these first ears
And they were the ones he broadcast in the spring.
As the land is now
It need not stay
Study, learn how
To shape it your way.
14
Year after year the grain he sowed weighed heavier
And many people came from all over Kazakhstan
To ask advice of the former nomad
Now the man in charge of millet in Kolkhoz Kurman.
15
When visitors came the old man took his net
Went to the Uil River and caught a silver-scaled fish.
For teaching and learning go on so much better
In company around a wholesome dish.
16
Talk is beautiful in well-fed company!
In the yurt they’re not disturbed by the little ones crawling through.
They drink hot tea, sitting on felt matting.
They smoke. All speak. And all are listened to.
“There’s plenty of tea.
Careful! The tea is hot.”
17
And in the aul they hear and speak of millet.
“I raise it,” the old man said, “like my own kind
Till it’s as brave as a horseman, cunning as a mullah
Proof against weeds and smoke and the drought-wind.”
“Wait! Here’s another visitor.
Shove up! Make room!”
18
Showing the large white grains of millet
He says, “Their time here’s up. And now they must be gone.
Two summers I have given them plenty of water
And where they are going now, there’s none.”
“Lean back, take your ease!
This meal is good and long.”
19
“And after one more year I’ll welcome
Back from the waterless field the best
The canniest seed, the hardened
Favourite child home to my breast.”
“Visitor, outside it’s getting light.
Your host must go to his fields.”
In spring 1939 the Bolshevik Party exhorted the Academy of Science and the kolkhozes of the South-Eastern Republics to join forces in a campaign against drought.
20
Joseph Stalin spoke of millet
Dung and drought to the disciples of Michurin.
The great overseer of the Soviet Peoples’ harvests
Said of millet, “She is a child in need of discipline.”
21
But millet herself was not the one on trial
When in Lysenko’s greenhouse in faraway Moscow
The moody daughter of the steppes was interrogated
She divulged what held her back and what would help her grow.
22
Forth then went the tribe of agronomists
Into the battle for production south and east
To inform the millet planters of what furthers
The millet’s blossoming and ripening most.
23
That she germinates in soil warmed through
A handbreadth deep to fifteen degrees
And so should be sown not when the calendar
But when the thermometer says.
“Help the patient
Help the humble
Help the stalwart
Friend and provider.”
24
And leave the whole field to the weeds
But plough them up before you sow the millet.
At fifteen degrees millet shows in three or four days
And new weeds coming on then will not harm it.
“Help the patient
Help the humble
Help the stalwart
Friend and provider.”
25
And how to sow: in well-spaced rows
For millet suffers growing tight
And yields three times as much if every
Stalk is given three times the light.
“Control your impatience!
Give to her who is asked to give!
More willingly she will help you
If she can
help herself.”
26
So to Kazakhstan, land of the nomads
Came the Academy’s call and exhortation.
The brigades challenged one another
To grow millet where before there was none.
27
And in field and aul, in school and workplace
At that great springtime’s daybreak things were under way
And Bersijew called to the millet-cadres in the kolkhozes
Rosa Luxemburg and New Day:
“Out into the fields!
The days are short
The yield is the measure
Of what kind of comrades you are.”
28
In the competition old Bersijew
Issued a challenge: could they beat him?
And to honour the new rules of this contest
He shared the best of his stock of seed with them.
“Out into the fields!
The days are short
The yield is the measure
Of what kind of comrades you are.”
29
Back to the Kolkhoz Kurman came the exhausted throng
Of men and tractors and arriving there
They fetched the scales and weights and weighed
Five and twenty double-centner for each hectare.
30
Tenfold increase on the yields of previous years!
All winter long around the stove in every yurt
They praised the millets Bersijew had grown
He meanwhile was musing on a new sort.
Dreams! Oh the golden “if only”!
