The Verse of Alfred LichtensteinLichtenstein, Alfred
General
The Verse of Alfred Lichtenstein
Lichtenstein, Alfred
German poetry -- Translations into English
You don't love me... I have never appealed to you...
Was never your type...
And my hard eyes annoy you, my darling...
I'm too dark for you. And too coarse--
And my white teeth have such a brutal shine
And my bloody lips are so terribly like sickles.
Ah, what you say--
Yes you are really right. I set you... free.
... And early in the morning I am going to an ocean
That is blue and eternal...
And lie on the beach...
And play with a smile on my face, until a death grabs me,
With sand and sun and with a white
Slender bitch.
Love Song
Your eyes are bright lands.
Your looks are little birds,
Handkerchiefs gently waving goodbye.
In your smile I rest as though in bobbing boats.
Your little stories are made of silk.
I must behold you always.
The Suicide
White, I lie
On the remains of an amusement park
Between jagged buildings--
Burning flower... shining sea...
Toes and hands
Reach out into emptiness.
Longing tears the weeping body to pieces.
The little moon glides above me.
Eyes grope
Gently into the deep world,
Sunken hats
Wandering stars.
Touched
I gladly left
The noisy death of the city,
With its thousands of leering faces,
The yellow night of the alleys.
I stride into the broad,
Silver sky;
The pious limbs glide
Deep into gently being.
I am in the white brightness
Of cloud, meadow, wind.
Am tree, am town, am child...
How wet are my eyes!
Soon the green evening will stand
At its silver end...
I raise blessed hands--
I want to go to meet it--
Prayer to People
I go through the days
Like a thief.
And no one hears
My heart lament to itself.
Please have pity.
Like me.
I hate you.
I want to embrace you.
Wanderer in the Evening
Kuno Kohn sings:
Dusty Sunday
Lies burned to pieces.
Charred coolness
Mothers the land.
Dissolute longing
Gapes once again.
Dreams and tears
Stream upward.
Evening
Houses stand stiffly next to their fences.
Let your eyes, last sparrows, flutter.
Bluebottles alight on your face.
Don't you, Kuno, feel the eternal mills--
The unfeeling one bores holes in your head.
Look once more at the moon, the mustard-pot murderer.
Spring
All men are now greedy,
All women are shouting,
Hide yourself in your hump,
Remain alone--
Kuno Kohn's Five Songs to Mary
First Song:
So many years I sought you, Mary--
In gardens, rooms, cities and mountains,
In dumps, whores, in acting schools,
In sick beds and in the rooms of mad people,
In kitchen maids, screaming, celebrations of spring,
In every kind of weather and every kind of day,
In coffee houses, mothers, dancers--
I did not find you in bars, motion pictures,
Music-cafes, excursions into the summer mist...
Who knows the agony, when I, in the night on the streets,
Cried out for you to the dead sky--
Next Song:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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