Then
it was a
place refracted
by the prism of history and
still in a kind of shock
of the past,
when
you never knew
the station you’d come into
Charlottenburg,
Lichtenberg,
or Zoo,
which
was something
to do with the old sectors,
the vectors of history not stopping
but bendable, after all, for now a vast
shopping mall with a station
somewhere in it is
the terminus of
every train.
What
else survived
has been lost under
other malls and hotels,
office buildings, a multipurpose
Holocaust memorial teenagers sunbathe on,
history leveled like the Tiergarten’s trees
after the war for warmth,
subsumed by consumers,
tourists, hipsters,
businessmen,
who
have papered
over everything
with money; for corporations,
governments, our collective consciousness
pisses on history with money
to make more money grow
like poppies on graves.
We lay waste our
past hours with
something new
to buy. Yes,
people
asked
once
Where
is the Wall?
and even then
you would have to
point them from construction
to museums and
tell them
How
was the Wall
made, suffered,
imagined? would have
been the better
question,
Why
in a moment
did it vanish, and
Do we understand
anything
after
all?
Coco de Casscza has recently published poems in Rattle, Mudfish, and U.S. 1 Worksheets.
Photo of Berlin Wall by Flickr Creative Commons user Gonzo Carles.
