.
.
Every country brings
its children up
imprisoned by its
nationality – ergo
every upbringing is strange:
each nation
trains its trapped
constituents to wrap
themselves in scratchy
coverings
of fearsome premises and
to consume
great quantities and
sizes of infernal
truths that they’ll
assume to be eternal.
Thus are we saddled,
addled, reined in
like unwitting cattle
into languages
and rules and other rude
awakenings
against which we have
no defense.
.
Hence, perhaps, why,
going to Berlin,
where I would undergo
the vaguest
whispered consequences
of a place
so riddled with its privacies,
so rattled
with its rage at having
to feel shame
about itself, I
couldn’t blame it for not
being anything whoever
wasn’t German
could quite name. It’s
the country’s capitol,
and yet succeeds in
failing to cajole
a single soul into
rejoicing in its economic
boom and bloom: there
isn’t room
for praise: only blurry
memories of days
.
the city can’t
re-live. But I wondered
at how any country
can forgive itself,
or sieve the poison
out of cells it’s
irremediably stained with
its inevitable
sins. For it’s not
only Germany that presses
into hearts to darken
them: harken to
our own beleaguered pasts
and presents:
the then’s and now’s of
us that bear the scars
of the interment,
torture, murder
of the body and the
soul to which America
remanded untold
numbers of the human
beings it held
captive: people it enslaved.
.
History entirely retains
its mystery until we’re
able to breathe in the
acid tendril scents
it always will have
left of any flesh it’s burned.
On such horrors have
our nations turned.
Berlin is more than
sin, more than it’s taken in;
the USA construes a
way to kindness,
sometimes, and to something
strongly felt
as freedom. But
neither one has solved
the oddity of being
human in great masses,
or how to lead them into
breathing unity –
or who can’t seem not
to divide each
other into classes born
of the belief that
.
one’s self-evidently
better than another.
For that, perhaps, we’d
all have had
to have the same exhausted
mother we
could love and who’d love
us. Into
what world, though, would
that great
strained enormity
shove us? A lineage
of disciplined Queen
Bees, producing
billions of identical
small you’s and me’s.
Immune to difference
or strife:
Is that a life that
would appease?
Or must life tend to
us, and bend us
into terrible impossibilities,
from which,
.
at moments, some
transcendent loveliness
might find a way to
scent the breeze?
Is all that’s open to
my human brain
the idiocies of its
fantasies? If there’s
an end to this, who could
know or see it?
Much less be it? And still
I wait to smell
the roses – no, I
lie. I’d rather smell
the sweat. Oh yes, it’s
sweat I crave
to smell. The sweat of
human forcefulness
all siphoned into
bodies into sex. Can
a heaven make provision
for a hell?
Would that cast or
break the spell?
.
