After the Anschluss and Sudetenland,

before the invasion of Poland,

Bertholt Brecht, in exile from the Third Reich

in a thatched cottage on a Danish island,

posed a question in a short poem –

‘When the dark times arrive will there still be songs?’

As poets tend to do Brecht answered himself.

‘Yes, there will even then be singing – about

the dark times that have come’.

After the arms manufacturer’s profits

have returned to normal, and democratic

politicians’ have devised new distractions

for their electorates, and cheerleaders

who would send other people’s sons and daughters

to war have found new enthusiasms,

and the defeated have been punished,

the pacifists admonished, the victors

exonerated, and much of Africa

and the so-called Middle East has been unpeopled

by famine, and the world continues

to be consumed by fire, drought and flood,

will there still be singing?

Note: For a translation rather than an imitation of Brecht’s ‘In den finsteren Zeiten…’ see Edwin Morgan’s: https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/when-times-darken/.