Berlin

By COCO DE CASSCZA

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.

Berlin

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