(in St. Paul, Minn.)

Why does the owl, her nest turned into flames
By an errant fire balloon, shriek as she flees?
As the solo goose flaps his steady beat,
Sea-bound, whom does he think will hear his honk?
An eagle chick pecks to a slow death her
New-hatched twin so that the fitter one will last.
It’s clear why the weaker chick pecks back, but
Why have a voice and to whom does he bleat?

Eight with twenty-one zeros. That’s how many
Letters and numbers, dots, jots, tittles and clicks
Our chatty species sent around this year–
More than in a score of generations past.
Into that wind-whipped Sonoran, I cast
These sixty grains, these quiet sounds I hear,
In hopes their mood or sense or purpose sticks
In the swirl that obscures so much and so many.

A poem for the summer of Ferguson, Gaza, ISIS, and Ukraine: Bertolt Brecht’s An die Nachgeborenen (1939), in my translation from the very simple and direct German.

I

Truly I live in dark times!
A sincere word is folly. A smooth forehead
Indicates insensitivity. If you’re laughing,
You haven’t heard
The bad news yet.

What are these times, when
A conversation about trees is almost a crime
Because it implies silence about so many misdeeds,
When, if you’re calmly crossing the street,
It means your friends can’t reach you
Who are in need?

It’s true: I earn a living.
But believe me, that’s just a coincidence. Nothing
of what I do entitles me to eat my fill.
It’s a coincidence that I am spared. (If my luck stops, I’m lost.)

They tell me: eat and drink! Be glad that you did!
But how can I eat and drink if
What I eat is snatched from the hungry,
My glass of water from someone dying of thirst?
And yet I eat and drink.

I would like to be wise.
The old books say what wisdom is:
To shun the strife of the world and spend the short time
You’ve got without fear.
Do without violence.
Return good for evil.
Not fulfilling desires but forgetting
Counts as wisdom.
I can’t do any of that:
Truly I live in dark times!

II

I came to the cities in a time of disorder.
When famine ruled.
I came among the people in a time of turmoil
And I rebelled with them.
So the time passed
That was given me on earth.

I ate my food between slaughters.
Murder lay over my sleep.
I loved carelessly
And I looked upon nature with impatience.
So the time passed
That was given me on earth.

In my time, roads led into the swamp.
Speech betrayed me to the slaughterer.
I could do very little. But without me,
Rulers would have sat more securely, or so I hoped.
So the time passed
That was given me on earth.

Energies were low. The goal
Was far in the distance,
Clearly visible, though for me
Hard to reach.
So the time passed
That was given me on earth.

III

You who you will emerge from the flood
In which we have sunk,
Think
When you speak of our weaknesses
And of the dark time
That you have escaped.

For we went, changing countries more often than shoes,
In class wars,* desperate
When there was only injustice and no outrage.

This we knew:
Even hatred of humiliation
Distorts the features.
Even anger against injustice
Makes the voice hoarse. Oh, we
Who wanted to prepare the ground for friendliness
Could not ourselves be kind.

But you, when
one can help another,
Think of us
Forgivingly.

*I translate Brecht’s phrase literally, although I do not agree that in his time or ours the situation can be adequately described as die Kriege der Klassen.

This may sound like Basho, but it’s actually from Tripadvisor, describing the Dilek National Park in western Turkey:

Purest beach. Comfort of
pine tree’s shadow.
Wild pigs around of you and asking meal.
Peaceful please in every season

Not so much facilities inside.
Do not expect so much.
Hard to find sandy beach inside this park.
Expect wild bores and squirrels around.