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      March 22, 2011Sitting on the Berlin WallPatrick Hicks

                       January 1990

      On my way back to Belfast I wandered past Bebelplatz,
      smelled the air for burning books, glanced at Brandenburg Tor,
      and went to that open field, Potsdamer Platz.
      I chewed the alien words until, like the Berlin Wall,
      my trust in language simply
      collapsed.

      Bordered by dead grass and foot-churned mud,
      the long barrier, thick as memory, attacks the horizon–
      a concrete scalpel slicing through the city.
      I move to touch it: rough, strong, as dirty as politics.

      A fresh hole smashed into the Soviet concrete
      allowed noisy graffiti to frame East Germany.
      I clasped a hook of rebar and swung myself up
      onto the back of history. I straddled the Wall,
      one foot here, the other there,
      while a helicopter thumped in the distance,
      its angry rotor reminding me of home, of Belfast.
      I close my eyes and hover above the city of my birth–
      the puff of tear gas, the pop of bombs,
      funeral processions that twist
      through flag-ridden streets.
      The Peace Line, thick as memory,
      slices the city in two, cleaving hate from hate.

      Again in the middle of Potsdamer Platz,
      I look from side to side,
      and reassure the worried concrete
      that there is still work to be done.

      from #20 - Winter 2003