On the Birkenkopf
For five years they steadily carried it up itself
with diggers, bulldozers, and mechanical shovels
--tipped it out by the bucketful, by the lorryload,
either side of the winding track way their huge wheels
Pressed out of the earthwork, compacting the uprise
with steamrollers, pneumatic hammers.
Millions of cubic meters of lintels, cornices, door-jambs
tumbles out in a cascade of thumping hydraulics
as the city cleared of its rubble, the trackway rose,
and saplings already took root in the lower slopes
of the conveyed mountain. We walk up to the summit
tonight, crossing through forty years' woodland--
shrubs sprawl in profusion, greenery hangs everywhere
over the weedy path, and the sun flames itself down
in magnificent splendour past Renningen; beacon lights
from the Fernsehturm, scour the hills rhythmically
and the winking city below us is dancing, suspended
it seems, in mid-air. Holderlin's evening sky blooms
in the fragrance of dog roses and wild honeysuckle,
the gigantic, collapsed colonnades of a ruined garden
seeding themselves, bombed houses exfoliating debris
--porch, windowsill, gate-arch, shattered mantelpiece,
relics weathered by time and our plain determination
to build high, high into air, and not to forget.
We turn from the summit, guessing at the deep center.
My grandfather pulled wood from the blitzed cathedral
and had candlesticks fashioned form it; small comforts
he said, and to keep darkness from having the last word.
Sitting in the Rosengarten
The old woman has carefully folded her dog in two,
his PVC whiskers secured, waterproof ears neatly packed
in their buttondown polyethylene stowaway--it will not rain
this morning, anywhere in the rose garden. Herr Dollmeyer,
stifling but immaculate in a dark worsted three-piece suit,
...
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