Berlin
(for Alfred Sassoon)





Paintings are dragged from museums,
stoned like ancient prostitutes,
books drawn and quartered like traitors.

Faces are sculpted as if from clay,
round cheeks, curved lips
blunted beneath the political knife,
eyes blasted in a kiln of blame.

Barbed wire is hung.
Smoke rises over steeples.

Sixty-odd years later,
I stand in a glass monolith,
praying we have overcome,
that the crimes of the past
are like salmon that died mid-journey.

But everything, or at least its legacy, returns--
most of all that envy

lodged somehow in the human heart.

John Amen's poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in various publications, including Poetry Bay Magazine, The Adirondack Review, The Melic Review, among others. Amen has toured extensively as a performing musician, both as a solo act and with a band, and has released three full-length recordings, Wild but Willing, Eat Mine, and Four Forty Four. He is editor in chief of the online literary bimonthly The Pedestal Magazine. 
E-mail: jamen32499@aol.com


Back to Poetry Page
[Back to top]