Courage Poem by gershon hepner

Boots to walk in till you die
is what she sold;
Mother Courage didn’t lie.
Growing old
is not what soldiers can expect
when wearing boots.
We should have courage to object
to crime crapshoots
called war by politicians who
make sure we’re hurtled
with boots to battles where just few
survive. Thanks, Berthold,
for writing about boots men wear,
condemned to die
because their politicians share
the biggest lie.

Manohla Dargis reviews “Theater of War, ” a movie based on Bertolt Brecht’s epic play “Mother Courage and Her Children, ” directed by John Walter and starring Meryl Streep (“Mother Courage Gets Her Own Camp Follower, ” NYT, December 24,2008) :
“Theater of War” is also, as a matter of course, about Brecht. He wrote the landmark “Mother Courage” in the late ’30s while in exile in Scandinavia, having left Germany in 1933 soon after Hitler was appointed chancellor. Set against the Thirty Years’ War and opening in 1624, the play pivots on Mother Courage, a war profiteer who sells goods to soldiers from her canteen wagon. (“Boots they will march in until they die! ”) In time she loses her three children to the war, yet she holds on to her wagon, which she drags behind her like a coffer (or coffin) . Though it is often described as a war play, the theater critic and Brecht translator Eric Bentley has countered that it is actually a business play…. There is much to admire in a movie in which intelligent adults — like Mr. Weber, who, as a former Brecht assistant, offers insight into his working habits — discuss art as if it matters (because it does) and without the self-flattering grandiosity that sometimes emerges when the subject turns to actors. But because this is also a document of an actress actually at work, much of the movie’s pleasure comes from watching another brilliant performance take shape as Ms. Streep tries out different line readings, gestures and poses in her search for Mother Courage. It’s a transformation — “I’m the voice of dead people, ” the actress explains, “I’m the interpreter of lost songs” — that doesn’t fully emerge until she delivers the devastating “Song of the Great Capitulation” to a young soldier.

12/24/08