Academic journal article Transactions of the American Philosophical Society
Palaces
Article excerpt
A city with a knife in its heart,
nerves exposed, arteries dangling, its temples to kingship,
religion, learning, and art
begrimed, and pock-marked by bullets,
or spruced, sand-blasted, and lacquered
to face the new market day. No wonder History
has a grim and elderly look.
She sits at the base of Schiller's statue,
manly, legs crossed, in her toga,
while her buxom sisters in négligé, Lyric,
Drama, and Philosophy, flirt with the passersby.
The boulevards convulse in excavations,
cranes rake the sky. The Palace of Tears
still runs with tears. In vacant lots
barrels protrude from puddles of khaki water,
pennants of shredded plastic shiver from chain-link fence.
Loss opens the way, I wrote in a letter
that was not a letter of love.
On Sophienstrasse, a small, grubby-faced boy
works with scholarly concentration
to dislodge a cobblestone the size of a scone
from the sidewalk in front of Queen Sophie Luisa's church. …
Related books and articles
- Books
- Journals
- Magazines
- Newspapers
- Encyclopedia