The Verse of Alfred Lichtenstein | Page 8

cool and friendly. A nurse
Savors quite a
bit of sausage in the background.
Cloudy Evening
The sky is swollen with tears and melancholy.
Only far off, where its
foul vapors burst,
Green glow pours down. The houses,
Gray
grimaces, are fiendishly bloated with mist.
Yellowish lights are beginning to gleam.
A stout father with wife and
children dozes.
Painted women are practicing their dances.

Grotesque mimes strut towards the theater.
Jokers shriek, foul connoisseurs of men:
The day is dead... and a
name remains!
Powerful men gleam in girls' eyes.
A woman yearns
for her beloved woman.

Sunday Afternoon
Packs of houses squat along rotten streets,
Around whose hump a
gray sun shines.
A perfumed, half crazy little poodle
Casts
exhausted eyes at the big world.
In a window a boy catches flies.
A
badly soiled baby gets angry.
On the horizon a train moves through
windy meadows:
Slowly paints a long thick stroke.
Like typewriters
hackney hooves clatter.
A dust-covered, noisy athletic club comes
along.
Brutal shouts stream from bars for coachmen.
Yet fine bells
mix with them.
On the fairgrounds where athletes wrestle,

Everything is dark and indistinct.
A barrel organ howls and scullery
maids sing.
A man is smashing a rotting woman.
The Excursion
(Dedicated to Kurt Lubasch, July 15, 1912)
You, I can endure these stolid
Rooms and barren streets
And the red
sun on the houses,
And the books read
A million times ago.
Come,
we must go far
Away from the city.
Let us lie down
In this gentle
meadow.
Let us raise, threatening yet helpless
Against the mindless,
large,
Deadly blue, shiny skies,
The fleshless, dull eyes,
The
cursed hands,
Swollen from crying.
Summer Evening
All things are seamless,
As though forgotten, light and dull.
From
the sacred heights the green sky spills
Still water on the city.

Glazed cobblers' lamps shine.
Empty bakeries are waiting.
People
in the street, astonished, stride
Towards a miracle.
A copper red
goblin runs
Up towards the roof, up and down.
Little girls fall,
sobbing
From the poles of street lights.
The Trip to the Mental Hospital (II)

A little girl crouches with her little brother
Next to an overturned
barrel of water.
In rags, a beast of a person lies gulping food
Like a
cigarette butt on the yellow sun.
Two skinny goats stand in broad
green spaces
On pegs, and their ropes sometimes tighten.
Invisible
behind monstrous trees
Unbelievably at peace the huge horror
approaches.
Peace
In weary circles a sick fish hovers
In a pond surrounded by grass.
A
tree leans against the sky--burned and bent.
Yes... the family sits at a
large table,
Where they peck with their forks from the plates.

Gradually they become sleepy, heavy and silent.
The sun licks the
ground with its hot, poisonous,
Voracious mouth, like a dog--a filthy
enemy.
Bums suddenly collapse without a trace.
A coachman looks
with concern at a nag
Which, torn open, cries in the gutter.
Three
children stand around in silence.
Towards Morning
What do I care about the swift newspaper boys.
The approach of the
late auto-beasts does not frighten me.
I rest on my moving legs.
My
face is wet with rain.
Green remains of the night
Stick to my eyes.

That's the way I like it--
Even as the sharp, secret
Drops of water
crack on thousands of walls.
Plop from thousands of roofs.
Hop
along shining streets...
And all the sullen houses
Listen to their

Eternal song.
Close behind me the burning night is ruined...
Its
smelly corpse burdens my back.
But above me I feel the rushing,

Cool heaven.
Behold--I am in front of a
Streaming church.
Large
and quiet it takes me in.
Here I shall stay for a while.

Immersed in
its dreams.
Dreams out of gray
Silk that does not shimmer.
Bad Weather
A frozen moon stands waxen,
White shadows,
Dead face,
Above

me and the dull
Earth.
Throws green light
Like a garment,
A
wrinkled one,
On bluish land.
But from the edge
Of the city,

Like a soft hand without fingers,
Gently rises
And fearfully
threatening like death
Dark, nameless...
Rising
Without sound,

An empty slow sea swells towards us--
At first it was only like a
weary
Moth, which crawled over the last houses.
Now it is a black
bleeding hole.
It has already buried the city and half the sky.
Ah,
had I flown--
Now it is too late.
My head falls into
Desolate
hands.
On the horizon an apparition like a shriek
Announces

Terror and imminent end.
The Sick
Evening and grief and lamp light
Bury our death-face.
We sit at the window and drop out of it,
Far off day still squints at a
gray house.
We scarcely touch our life...
And the world is a
morphine dream...
Blinded by clouds the sky sinks.
The garden
expires in dark wind--
The watchmen enter,
Lift us up into bed,

Inject us with poison,
Kill the lamp.
Curtains hang in front of the
night...
They disappear gently and slowly--
Some groan, but no one
speaks,
Our buried face sleeps.
Cloud
A fog has destroyed the world so gently.
Bloodless trees dissolve in
smoke.
And shadows hover where shrieks are heard.

Burning beasts
evaporate like breath.
Captured flies are the gas lanterns.
And each flickers, still attempting
to escape.
But to one side, high in the distance, the poisonous moon,

The fat fog-spider, lies in wait, smoldering.
We, however, loathsome, suited for death,
Trample along, crunching
this desert splendor.
And silently stab the white eyes of misery
Like

spears into the swollen night.
The City
A white bird is the big sky.
Under it a cowering city stares.
The