Sunday, November 11, 2018

notes from the other side, part 1

east berlin, gdr, 1968

he might have been a sailor
or a machinist
from the roughness of his hands
or a printer like the hundreds of hands
at the karl marx printing factory
but actually
he was a writer
a poet twisting in a straightjacket
unable to break free
"this is the shit"
he'd say
of the reality
of socialist realism

mind you
he was the true revolutionary
caught between the passion
and the facts of life
past the age of forty and still advocating
for the great transformation
even my comrade with his superior analytical precision
and pointing index finger
couldn't apply the dogma
to the reality

the room in the apartment
was filled with smoke
and a few expatriates
everyone was squirming
the musty indian rug was worn
yet warm to the touch
the lighting dull
a touch of cognac or vodka
nothing but a stale taste to hide pain

the writer kept repeating
"where can i go where it isn't like this"
i thought
maybe vietnam

i never found out
what happened to him
whether he survived the purges
and prisons
or got his words published somewhere

the cobblestones of east berlin
were laid out in a grid not a garden
without space to grow
intransigence locked in
between paranoid concrete walls
and raw power
from the end of a rifle
to a cannon mount
on a tank turret
taking aim
at the poets

--- e b bortz

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Captured better than LeCarre who was on the outside, looking in. So Padre you were in East Berlin in 1969!? In summer? the year after the Prague Spring?

e b bortz said...

thanks...and yeah...less than a year.