Ernst Toller Poems

In spring I go to war
To sing or to die.
What do I care for my own troubles?
Today I shatter them, laughing in pieces.
...

A dung heap of rotting corpses:
Glazed eyes, bloodshot,
Brains split, guts spewed out
The air poisoned by the stink of corpses
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Cities are so far away, humans live there.
The knot chokes at your throat, a gray
horror caresses your limbs. Who will freedom behold?
When, at last, will the grubs rise up?
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Through shell-holes,
puddles of mud,
they trudge.
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The people's conscience squats
on a worm-eaten pole.
Around the pole dance the bones of three children.
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They chisel their force into the dawning sky.
They forge their steeled selves on the precipice.
They split through the fog like axes
so that each breath shatters around them.
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Starry sky.
To restrain the beast
my rifle glows,
to fix the black barrel
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Through the grill of my cell
I see children playing.
Pinned there, shrinking there,
prison-years… torture-years…
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In early evening the cell flares up.
Thin shadows slide down the gray walls.
He who cries out in mutiny exhausts into a dream.
The brown stillness sweeps over like a gentle wave.
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Death-prone, the bodies
forked in mutiny
against the collar
of the uncooked plague,
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