Music For Brass, by Gunter Grass (trans. by Christopher Middleton)
Those days we slept in a trumpet.
It was very quiet in there,
we never dreamed it would sound,
lay, as if to prove it,
open-mouthed in the gorge --
those days, before we were blown out.
Was it a child, on his head
a helmet of studied newspaper,
was it a scatty hussar
who walked at a command out of the picture,
was it even those days death
who breathed that way on his rubber stamp?
Today, I don't know who woke us,
disguised as flowers in vases,
or else in sugar bowls,
threatened by anyone who drinks coffee
and questions his conscience:
one lump or two, or even three.
Now we're on the run and our luggage with us.
All half-empty paper bags, every crater in our beer,
cast-off coats, clocks that have stopped,
graves paid for by other people,
and women very short of time,
for a while we fill them.
In drawers full of linen and love,
in a stove which says no
and warms its own standpoint only,
in a telephone our ears have stayed behind
and listen, already conciliant,
to the new tone for busy.
Those days we slept in a trumpet.
Backward and forward we dreamed,
avenues, symmetrically planted.
On a tranquil unending back
we lay against that arch,
and never dreamed it would sound.
