THE GREAT ENCLOSURE

Here now day
gently turns into night.

Somewhere circa
1832.

Time is captured in paint
unable to escape the painting,

We stand on a bend
of the river Elbe.

Sunset spills over
into the estuary.

Light and water
becomes as one.

Caspar David Fredrick
the great rückenfigur

the artist as a wanderer
above the sea of fog.

We can move even further
back into Napoleonic days.

His troops reviewed
in this self same place.

All the circumstance
of military pomp.

Sunlight glancing
off rows and rows

5,000 cavalry
15,000 infantry.

The Battle of Dresden
is yet to be fought.

Move further forward once again
time always eager to move on

and the scene becomes
the biggest slaughterhouse complex

in all of Europe
the cries of man and beast

lost
on the wind.

"The feeling one has gazing
at it is as though

one's eyelids
have been cut away."

Now see how it morphs
into an industrial area.

Sports park.

Dark.