Humanist Perspectives: issue 181: A Poet’s Voice

A Poet’s Voice
by Walter Bauer (translated by Henry Beissel)

Walter Bauer was born to a poor working-class family in Merseburg (Germany) in 1904; he died in 1976 in Toronto as a professor of German literature at U of T. His life is the troubled story of his time, starting with his youth in WW I and the turbulent aftermath, followed by the tyranny of Hitler’s Germany where some of his books were banned and he barely escaped incarceration. Surrounded by the 20th century’s horrific atrocities, he championed Camus’ conviction that there is more to admire in humanity than to despise. He emigrated to Canada in 1952, where he became one of our foremost immigrant poets. In over 60 books of poetry, plays, fiction, essays and biographies, he urged upon his readers the need to combine reason with compassion.

Author’s Statement: Walter Bauer declined to accept the end of humanity; he believed in the human spirit’s capacity for compassion, sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s duty, he told us, is to nourish that spirit and thus endow us with courage and hope. It’s not enough for the poet to record the past, he or she must also reveal the inherent glory of humanity’s achievement at its best and thus help imbue us with the strength and intelligence to pursue a viable path into a greater future.
Renoir’s Grave
Not much lies here. The earth found
what was buried here light as a brush.
Eyes came to rest here
that could never get enough of seeing
flowers, women, gardens, skies and fields –
all swelling in a painter’s year that lasted
eighty years, breathing fruit, bursting with light.
Did time ever catch up with him?

In his eyes fleeting moments stopped
in their tracks: an apple, Lisa and a child –
nothing could escape his vision.
In old age they tied his hands to his brush:
richer now was the fruit of his labours.
Like Orpheus, he was passing without lament
as everything grow riper and richer at his touch.
What was he so busy painting? Something
that we no longer know: happiness.
* * *

The Seeker’s Eyes
Those who never tire of learning
will travel farther than those
who content themselves
with a set of truths others found,
farther than those who learn
for the sole purpose of establishing themselves
comfortably, and who then say:
wife, children, house, car, security –
that’s all I want. – They
have locked themselves in a cage,
however spacious and cosy.

I praise the eyes which are hungry,
I praise the eyes which never tire of searching,
I praise the visionaries that explore
without accepting limits before they reach them,
I praise the seeker’s eyes.
* * *

How Clear the Sky
How clear the sky today!
It stretches into infinity,
a page of purest blue. –
Did anyone ever write on it?

The rain has washed the shadows away,
the night wind blew the sky clean and dry,
the silence laid it firm and flat –
a skyblue page of pure blue sky.

What will I write in that blue space?
Which of my words will fit it?
I hesitate, look up again – and there,
in a flash, a bird in flight writes: light!
* * *

Canada

The north does not bestow the wisdom
of Plato. Nor did Dante pass here
through the inferno in the fellowship of Virgil.
And Rembrandt? Not here the glamour of great lords
and then the drunken unknown king in exile.

Here you receive another kind of wisdom,
bitter and icy, and not to everyone’s taste.
This earth says:
I was here long before you and the likes of you came;
unmolested I conversed with wind and rivers –
don’t forget that, my friend.
The wind blows cold from Labrador:
I have a message for you from the ice age,
but I shall not decode it for you.
The forests of the north surge like waves:
We shall outlast all of you.
The Yukon and the Mackenzie flow with endless patience:
Son, don’t make things too hard for yourself.
Different times will come when you’re gone, stranger.

The Arctic expresses the sum total of all wisdom:
Silence. Nothing but silence. The end of time.
* * *

No Difference Anymore
In the end
there was no difference anymore
between Plato whom I read at night,

and Tu Fu whose verses
I carried in my pocket,

and the men of the 20th of July
who gave their lives trying
to dispose of a tyrant,

and the students
for whom I tried to open doors,

and the elderly woman who on Saturdays
smiled as she took my dirty laundry
at the Cleaners,

and the old Chinese mother
who cleaned my office over night –

there was no difference anymore
between them. The heights and depths
of their lives evened out because they gave me
the same thing: they made it possible for me
to live. They belonged together with me,
they gave my life strength and direction
so that I belonged to them,
all of them.
* * *

Cities And Factories
Cities grow –
and humanity grows lonelier.
Soon we’ll have to travel far
to see green earth:
ash turns it grey
and chokes its breath of flowers;
grain grows lean.

But factories grow higher and higher,
chimneys smoke without hope,
and higher grow the fences of uniformity.

Soon no one will recognize us;
our faces will be pits of night
and the earth will have forgotten
who we are.