Eyes agog in a gas mask, wrapped in burlap sacks
against the cold, a pale young mother
pushes her cracked-rim pram up Kurfurstendamm
to the Kino-Theater, the only upright
structure which holds. Deep in goose down,
her child has one of a thousand dreams
of Krystallnacht, paths down to the suckling
Holstein milch cows, a future when the Wall
will be built and then torn down.
The movie marquis scallops in sheets
of falling plaster mesh, still boasting
the coming attraction, Journey to the Past,
a science-fiction film of pteranodons,
sipping politely from unpolluted creeks,
lost in a valley we can't go back to.
In a matter of days, smoke will claim them both,
so this is our farewell: she in her witches'
robes, legs spread wide apart for one more
birth in her skirts, mosquito-eyed, flying from
the upturned curbstones and continual rain
of mortar, to find a flower still in bloom.

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