Back from Berlin
by Sarah Kinebanian
Once more the leaves are raining from the trees
and when we walk, my russet-muffled dog
vanishes against the slope.
In Berlin too leaves fell in a russet light;
that undead city will not let me go.
Something was ready there to stir beneath the surface:
a spring coiled for release, an ominous strength
deleted more than once, and so effectively,
yet now renascent, huge, testing its massy bulk,
its metal ligaments.
Here evil and suffering met in a macabre two-step,
then sank exhausted into the poisoned soil.
To close the scarred voids, prevent all confrontation,
is only a way to deny a menace
that echoes louder than all reason
under the threshold where deep sound dissolves
into a strident silence.
I understand the bunker beneath the memorial.
The rest is a trivial scratching of the ground:
traffic, architecture and life of liberation.