BERTOLT BRECHT POEM: MEMORY OF MARIE A

This is one of my favourite non-English poems by the German dramatist and intellectual Bertolt Brecht.  For me it sums up the ephemerality  of love, how something that once seemed everything and important becomes, through time, inconsequential and hardly worth remembering but also, from a historical perspective, it is about the selectiveness of memory and the imperfection of memory.  Some people can see their past in a romanticised way while others seek to demonise people and their past-memories, particularly their relationships.  The truth probably rests somewhere in the middle.  

Perhaps the speaker in the poem responds emotionally rather than intellectually to the moment.  The love for the woman has long since died but perhaps he is still in love with the past and with the moment enough to record it in verse.  You decide!  Have a good day.

Steve

MEMORY OF MARIE A

It was a day in that blue month September
Silent beneath the plum trees’ slender shade
I held her there
My love, so pale and silent
As if she were a dream that must not fade

Above us in the shining summer heaven
There was a cloud my eyes dwelled long upon
It was quite white and very high above us
Then I looked up
And found that it had gone

And since that day, so many moons in silence
Have swum across the sky and gone below
The plum trees surely have been chopped for firewood
And if you ask, how does that love seem now
I must admit, I really can’t remember
And yet I know what you are trying to say
But what her face was like, I know no longer
I only know I kissed it on that day

As for the kiss, I long ago forgot it
But for the cloud that floated in the sky
I know that still and shall forever know it
It was quite white and moved in very high
It may be that the plum trees still are blooming
That woman’s seventh child may now be there
And yet that cloud had only bloomed for minutes
When I looked up
It vanished on the air


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