Photography: Rebecca Ruth Gould
Berlin’s Sky
Berlin’s sky
is bluer than the sea.
Its surface is an ocean
crested with foam.
The paper-thin skyscraper
poised above Potsdamer Platz
is ready to fall.
It will outlive us all.
Meanwhile, the blue sea
washes over me.
I cry because I am alive
& must take what is given to me.
If I ask for more,
it will be denied.
So I wander beneath Berlin’s
sky, remembering
everyone I have loved
who didn’t love me
& everyone I didn’t love
who loved me anyway.
I remember my passions,
my illusions, my sufferings, my lacks.
The blue sea of Berlin’s skyline
absorbs my agony.
I wander for the rest of my life,
greeting my mortality.
Potsdamer Platz, Berlin.
Returning to Berlin
2010 was when I last set foot
in Berlin & came to know
its boxy parapets,
& its towering cement.
Here I parted with my lover,
never to see him again.
I approach you in the new decade,
Berlin, paragon of order,
symbol of probity,
land of upright men.
Your Soviet slopes
evoke Leningrad’s dusky streets.
Somewhere between S-Bahns
& U-Bahns
stands my younger self,
testing the limits
of love & legality,
skimping on fares,
butting against libraries
that send you
to the clink
when your books are overdue.
Berlin, city of cruelty,
where I discovered Sylvia Plath
& I introduce Kafka to Dostoevsky.
Only when I discovered
Walter Benjamin
did English become
my habitation & I was made
a stranger to myself.
Tiergarten
Tiergarten’s beauty is a homely willow tree
dwelling peacefully by the Spree.
The garden’s glamour is its austerity.
Surreal calmness surrounds a postwar city.
Long ago, Berlin’s innards were emptied.
On the other side of that violent century,
young lovers pose beneath the blossoming dogwood tree,
while their friend snaps a photo.
Elderly couples clasp hands.
White flowers announce the arrival of spring
Sunbathers spread their thighs along the riverbank.
The Kreuzberger presses forward,
its passenger cabin empty.
To the Spree
You are not the Danube,
for which I forgot to sing a melody.
You are less romantic & less touristy.
However, when the sun turns the color
of a tangerine & cascades across
your silver scallops,
when the S-Bahn hovers
above your currents
like an angel
floating on water,
you are as gorgeous
as the filaments of light
floating on your surface.
When the Berlin wall
separated families,
babies drowned in your currents.
Laws forbade their rescue,
& you became a mortuary.
You flow quietly, across the taut landscape
of my broken memories.
Complicity
The night I spent in Dachau,
Germany’s first
concentration camp,
set the tone.
The Nazi drama plays out in many
places & in many ways.
Each instance is a rupture
in the fabric of time.
Each time,
is an unspeakable
never again, the professor said,
as evil repeated itself
ad infinitum. Horrid refrain.
On my way to the train station
I stepped on the names of
Hedwig Harrwitz &
Maximilian Harrwitz.
Their memorial stones
were embedded in the earth
of the house where
they lived before the catastrophe.
I wondered what
they would have made
of us humans
& of all the lessons
we have failed to learn,
of all the fascisms
flourishing after two world wars.
What they
would have said
about our complicity.
Memorial plaques for Hedwig Harrwitz & Maximilian Harrwitz, perished during the Shoah.
Graffitied City
The S-Bahn wraps
around Tiergarten
then sails over the
homely Spree.
Ground zero
of the twentieth century,
this graffitied city
prophecies
my mortality.
Sonnenallee
A refugee friend
once told me
how his flesh was surveilled
when he entered his host country.
I thought of him
while wandering down
Sonnenallee, reading
Arabic street signs hanging
from Syrian refugee homes.
In Medina grocery store,
golden brown dates are stacked
between loaves of Turkish peyner.
Islamic worlds meet
in this unlikely crossroads,
where Ali Baba’s Orient
butts against real lives.
Although our passports differ,
I too have sought permanence
among ruins, until words
became my abode.
My friend’s surveilled flesh
brought me to your postwar beginnings.
Like a refugee, I will carry
my home on my back,
like a snail carrying its shell,
while your children go to school,
become German, and prepare
a new world.
Walter Benjamin
Approaching the battlements of the school
where you passed your childhood
you pause over Savignyplatz,
named for the translator of Vico,
who setting humanity free centuries ago,
housing the shards of the school
you attended before the world exploded
into fragments of baroque ornaments.
Make do with what is resurrected today,
isolated pieces of the interior broken away.
Like Incan ruins excavated
too early, in too much ignorance.
Machu Picchu’s signs are erased by rain,
evacuated of artefacts
that prophesied another day.
Your memory said that rusted fragments preserve
the wholes of our shattered lives.
When you addressed Hamlet’s skull, returning
to the Berlin battlements that sheltered your childhood,
the whole was emptying out, entire populations lost.
A rejected thesis & Wanderlust
sent you sailing across the Pyrenees
towards a New World. History intervened,
inflicting another sovereign on your country:
popularly elected, publicly scorned.
In the artist’s words:
Rebecca Ruth Gould’s poems and translations have appeared in Nimrod, Kenyon Review, Tin House, The Hudson Review, Salt Hill, and The Atlantic Review. She translates from Persian, Russian, and Georgian, and has translated books such as After Tomorrow the Days Disappear: Ghazals and Other Poems of Hasan Sijzi of Delhi (Northwestern University Press, 2016) and The Death of Bagrat Zakharych and other Stories by Vazha-Pshavela (Paper & Ink, 2019). Her poem “Grocery Shopping” was a finalist for the Luminaire Award for Best Poetry in 2017, and she is a Pushcart Prize nominee.