Tulane Review Digital

Berlin Trilogy
By Laura White Gray
1. The Triumph of Capitalism (Low)
There they sit
bronzed dead gods
under the linden trees
and Prussian blue
skies, vacant-eyed
tombstones to an
empire as lifeless as
Bruegel’s painting. For all
eternity doomed to stare at
the Berliner Dom’s cross
their revolution lost.
Replaced by the proletariat’s new
neon mythos: KFC, Dunkin’ Donuts, Starbucks.
Among the tourists, a private revolt
launched: a girl, doll-like pupils
magnified behind Coke bottle glasses
stomps Marx’s stone foot and smiles
impishly for her mother’s iPhone
as pigeon droppings amass on
the statute’s impotent
bearded head.
2. Upon Their Ashes (Heroes)
Chilled soda bottles popped open.
Wrapped sandwiches held aloft.
Pickles, fried chips, basket, napkins.
Easter Sunday Berlin, 2015
Anno Domini. Germania: Anno Zero
plus seventy. Spring afternoon heavy
with hope. Once divided boulevards
cluttered with tourists’ tired feet.
Ashen stone slabs, a monument for Europe’s murdered
Jews serves as
a makeshift picnic blanket and a
gray as death background for selfies.
Auschwitz’s ashes mere dust on our shoes.
We eat and live and walk over memories
that cast no shadows. We have no past.
3. Darkness in the Sunlight (Lodger)
Light crashes hard against concrete
snapping crisp and easy as a
child’s neck under booted black heels.
Subterranean shadows burrow like
a bunker under an empty parking lot.
Imaginary Lugers from Trabant drive-bys
shoot-up the ghetto’s new walls. We waltz over
metallic faces of the dead
carved from haunted Mediterranean dreams.
Burnt flesh and Zyklon-B mingles with the
scent of Haifa’s bloody oranges and strange
fruit swaying like dead men in the breeze.