The Wall Poem by L.B. Temuco

There is nothing that simple about the palm-followed wall
that chatters its way to the shore. It runs straight at it.
Through Berlin again in that rusting Trabant. With its secret cargo.
This Wall. Its granite armour. The slate of a terrible presence.
Far from Freedom’s Gate,
this allotment
with its rotation of grief and sugar peas.
Breshnev and Nixon their poison tongues
on the T-shirt I wear on Linden Platz today.

History cycles this great length of stone
In another time in white, laughing
Through its opening, down the long drive to
A tennis court on the greenest of lawns
Pursuing
repelling always the rearrangement of men’s minds
Dehydrating in its Bunsen glare the phosphorus of a great dream
its lattice crumbling, drying. Dying.
This Endless Seam.
And in the way of a border, a dark curtain descends
On this Theatre
A fog over its cruelest of dreams
the silent crossings
endless screams

This at the moment of our meeting still divides me now
Only one hand clapping resonantlessly
This Wall down which atoms now tumble and slide
Helplessly rushing through Rome, a Jesuit
With no echo
Like drowning in a cold mountain river
Separating from the sky
In wilderness to the south
Something more between
Them
and Us
Is and Ought
than on its either sides.