Berlin

Günter Kunert

Berlin Afternoon

Summertime an overcast sky
summertime in a gentle rain
summertime in the cool of old apartments
amid imagined faces in the dark wallpaper:
lying there
listening to the muffled
thump of the Stadtbahn
the trotting carriages
the staccato of hand-powered machines
in backyard workshops blasted away
the deadly play of vanished bodies
pallid in the pale of clandestine beds
concealed behind crumbling stucco
behind the burgeoning scabs on old houses
that cranes and dump trucks will convey
one sudden afternoon
wreathless along with their contents
from their existence into my memory where
their transcience welcomed and wept for
will come to a stop: summertime
in a gentle rain.