Baruch Gottlieb
Poem to the pictures of Jinran Kim
After the Rain
The smoke silently smears into the sky, the rumble and echo underneath
may never subside. These images, made of ash drenched into tissue,
are barely able to coalesce into something recognizable, the ruins of
an ordinary day. Staid normalcy is ripped away. A humble hope stares
gaping, void. Dark gouges seep the empty streets, trickling broken pipes.
The end of an attack, of an onslaught, of a barrage, civilians,
civilization, trumped by a cause, by a reason.
Reason creates and reason destroys, flaying open the enclosed careful
coveting of reason.
In Berlin, as in Seoul, the streets still shimmer with the pounding of
those days. Seoul was razed, Berlin was like mouthfuls of broken
teeth, but here you could still see the buildings, and that it had
been a city. Coming from Seoul to Berlin, as the strangeness fades,
the similarities begin to impress themselves, or maybe there is a need
for similarities, and these are not happy ones, but perhaps ones where
fellow feeling can accrue like gunshot pockmarks darken with dew.
