On Poor BB on trial

My mother moved me into the cities as I lay inside her body

Out of the Black Forests (much polluted now, as the smokestacks outside Warsaw, Budapest, 
	/and, in particular, Prague, testify);

Setting up the ultimate trial: that of the cultural gangsters;

All of Chicago burning with the wicked grins of the Al Capones, Kafkas, the senators who saw 
	/fiendishness in the poems that you, or your collective, had written:

So What did you do to the Soldier's wife, in Paris, City of Light? 

The trial that you set up for yourself and Galileo echoes with Marianne 
	/Faithful screaming your obituary. 

Against that, the halting translation of the prosecutor:

Did you, or did you not write Das Marienleben?

Nein.

Die Sonette an Orpheus? 

Nein.

Did you not write a poem that said: 	

	We are the driving ones. 
	Ah, but the step of time:
	think of it as a dream 
	in what forever remains.

	All that is hurrying  	
	soon will be over with;
	only what lasts can bring
	us to truth. 

Nein. But, in my bad moments, I wish I had. 

If not you, who wrote that?

The Greatest Lesbian poet since Sappho.

What I said was much simpler. In Hollywood I think I was realistic

	Every day, to earn my daily bread
	I go to the market where lies are bought.
	Hopefully
	I take up my place among the sellers.

And after the 1953 uprising in Berlin, I was more positive:

	After the uprising of the 17th June
	The secretary of the Writers' Union
	Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
	that the people
	had forfeited the confidence of the government
	and could win it back only
	by redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
	in that case for the government
	to dissolve the people
	and elect another?

The problem is that the people keep dissolving themselves.	

Do you have any solutions?

	The bread of justice must be baked
	by the people.
	Plentiful, wholesome, daily.

Can you translate?

	Dance the Orange....

Thank you Mr Brecht. You are an excellent witness. 

	Everything changes. You can make
	A fresh start with your final breath.
	But what has happenned has happenned. And the water
	You once poured into the wine cannot be
	drained off again.


Ioan Davies

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