after Bertolt Brecht
To Those Born Later
(An die Nachgeborenen, c. 1938)
I.
Sharp-suited gangsters call the shots.
Ask a simple question and you drop yourself right in it.
They take one look at you
and decide if you’re in or out. Clearly, anyone thinking
this is a laughing matter better say their prayers.
I make smalltalk about gardening
but live looking over my shoulder.
That man over there looks this way and that
before crossing the street. So calm, you’d never know
his friends have gone into hiding.
Everyone looks down when they speak.
It’s only luck I still have a wage and bread,
but I’m sure it’s an oversight. I have no special place
or rights. Maybe that’s the secret: don’t get noticed.
(Once they take a second look, you’re done for.)
When I eat or drink, I think of the camps,
taste the barbed wire in the bread, and think
how many this water would have saved.
I’m told, nevermind them, you’ve earned it,
but their sly looks are hard to swallow.
I keep asking myself how I can be here,
and how you can be here,
and none of us have any answers.
We read all the right books, and tried
always to do the right thing.
And it wasn’t as if we had any ambitions,
except not to kill or to be killed. Looking back,
I think we weren’t as smart as we thought.
When the bucket of blood is full,
they just get a bigger bucket.
II.
When I came to the cities
bread was a thousand marks
and nobody had a thousand marks.
I went out in the streets with other men
and we took what wasn’t on fire.
So the days went, so my life.
My meals were in alleys, and the women
degraded by the love I offered. Even psychos
have their tender moments, though none
you might recognise unless you’d lived hungry
or seen your family pulped by the batons.
So the days went, so my life.
This was the end of the road.
The cities became what we made them,
the slop of time where choices ran out.
You can blame me if you want.
We all betray somebody.
So the days went, so my life.
It was a good idea gone wrong.
The weight of steel introduced us
to the pointlessness of our vision,
and we were buried together, in one grave,
in the forest whence we’d come.
So the days went, so my life.
III.
When you look back
and see our lives as a lost cause,
and consider our shortcomings, and our
horizons criss-crossed with tank treads,
keep in mind that your looking back
is what we left you. You survived.
We changed countries the way
some people change their shoes, and everybody
talked until they were buried in talk.
We tried forgiveness.
We were hoarse with forgiveness,
making ourselves heard above
the petty brutalities. But we were changed
the way people change
who cannot forgive themselves.
If you think of us at all, your days
sunny everyday, your neighbours neighbourly,
consider, too, that in this life
not everyone gets what they deserve,
but sometimes they do.
No comments:
Post a Comment